Kanata (32 page)

2

A
LBERTA,
1923

“You whisky-kneed squaw-mongering deertick fuckbox,” said Alhew, an American horse trader who had brought his substandard nags to sell to the absent Prince. “You snivelling King-sucking stoat-shit mongrel.” Alhew was drinking shots of whisky in the bar at Longview, his curses delivered to his own reflection in the sepia mirror, though his target was Michael, standing farther down the bar. Michael had passed on every one of Alhew's nags. The prices were inflated and the horses flawed.

“You think King Shit of Limeyville is going to even see the damn horses? What's it to you? The price is fair, you can ask anyone. This could be a good arrangement for both of us.”

“What did you do with the good horses?” Michael asked, staring at Alhew's reflection in the mirror, which revealed a slightly distorted version of his apoplectic eyes, his hat pushed back to reveal a high sweaty forehead.

“You know the pig-sticking son of a bitch is German. Whose side are you on? Them royals been inbreeding for two centuries it's a miracle they ain't born with two heads. Crap-eating Kraut defective and you're taking his side. Why do you think we fought the war?”

“What outfit were you with?”

“Christ.”

Alhew downed another shot. He now had a string of useless horses that he couldn't sell. He had heard about absentee royal money and thought he could cut a deal with Michael. Charge an inflated price, kick something back to Michael, and everyone benefits. The Prince visits six years from now and they're dead of natural causes anyway.

“You wouldn't know a deal if it lit a fire under your ass and fanned it.”

“But I know horses,” Michael said. He put his glass down and walked out of the bar.

“Blightfuck titty-brained money-killing shit-twit!” Alhew called out after him.

O
n Sundays Michael went to his mother's house for dinner. In the three years he'd been home, it had remained a house of mourning over absent sons, Stanford, and Dunstan's son Colin, who had died at the Somme. It wasn't just the two men who weren't there but the wives and children that would have arrived, the babies filling the space with hope and noise and shit. Michael's failure to fill this
void himself, his failure to arrive with a willowy girl who was shyly introduced, and then to arrive with news of a child on its way, threatened every Sunday. It was an unwelcome lacuna that waited for him on his mother's porch and followed him into her parlour.

They ate a pleasant dinner discussing the price of beef and feed and the new McLaughlin-Buick Touring car. Afterwards Michael played chess with O'Connell, who had a guileless defensive game.

“They are out there, Michael,” O'Connell said, pondering his knight, one finger on the equine head, rotating it slowly in preparation of a reluctant move. “There are lovely girls. Practical. Loose if it comes to that. All kinds. But they aren't going to set on you like hounds. They aren't going to tree you.”

Michael nodded. He was familiar with this narrative. Dunstan would mention how he saw Sarah Arthur at the post office looking lovely, or how he had seen Olive Banks—a woman who was taller than Michael and moved like a crane, in jerky movements that seemed to apologize for her height—and how Olive was coming into herself.

“What about that French girl?”

“Marie.” He had written them about a girl he'd met in Paris, a mistake. Now she had taken on life in their heads, had become perfect.

“Nice name. I'll bet she's a swell girl.”

“She is.”

“You could bring her out here.”

But he couldn't. Marie, what was the phrase he had heard so often in France? She wouldn't translate. At any rate, she was gone. Perhaps married now, pushing a large pram through Paris, a baby girl with her mother's smile. Michael
won another game against Dunstan and drove back to the EP. The moon was distant and small, an afterthought.

I
t was late fall when he headed south. He didn't have much of a plan but he had a little money saved and thought he'd take a look at the continent, perhaps go to Mexico. He wanted distance as much as adventure. He had thought that taking care of Ed's horses would be the ideal job. Ed hadn't returned to the ranch, and Michael was left on his own. But he had come to find it isolating. He needed movement or people, a change. His mother said her goodbyes at the house, telling him it was a vacation. He could come home when he wanted.

Dunstan drove him to the train station in Calgary. An early heavy snow had fallen in the night, and in the pale morning Michael saw a house being towed on skids down Fourth Street. It was being pulled torturously by two teams of horses, each team with ten horses yoked in twos. It looked like a funeral procession, the three-storey house being hauled away for burial.

On the train Michael sat across from a man with a meaty Irish head and thin lips. He reached a hand across. “Makin,” he said. “Bob Makin.” He was an American who worked in Hollywood and he'd been scouting locations in Alberta. They were thinking of making a movie here. “Beautiful country,” Makin said. “Look good on the screen.”

He asked Michael what he did and Michael told him he had worked for the man who was going to be King of England, Edward, the Prince of Wales.

Makin told him there was another version of royalty being created in California, made up of the sons and daughters
of farmers and factory workers made royal by luminous skin, expressive eyes, and a winning smile. They had millions of subjects. An artistocracy to be reckoned with.

“Ed's going to be out of a job soon,” Makin said. “You aren't going to need English princes or dukes or lords or any of that. This is the new royalty: Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks. These are the kings and queens. And the other ones, they'll just disappear. You know why? I'll tell you. Two reasons. First, let's face it, they don't do anything. Right? Second, even if they did, who cares? No one sees it anyway. The new royalty, they're in every town in America, the world practically. Every theatre, every magazine. You can't pick up a newspaper.”

Michael watched the country go by in ordered lines, cattle huddled near the fences.

“Mike,” Makin said. “You won't believe the skirt down there. You look out that window. Every hick town has one pretty girl, one girl who everyone knows is going to leave soon as she's of age. She's too pretty to spend her life being gawked at by squarehead farmers. That girl goes to Hollywood. Skirt, I'm telling you.”

“Is there work there?”

“For the girls? Hell no, not what they came for anyway.”

“For me, I mean. You think I'd be able to find something?”

“You Italian? I know they're using Italians in the movies to play Indians. Ride around without a shirt, look fierce.”

“I'm not Italian.”

“You could pass.”

Michael slept for a few hours and then watched the ripe promise of the Midwest, its dormant fields, the shining towns sitting primly beneath the afternoon sun, a country in bloom.

3

L
OS
A
NGELES,
1924

The California sky, the religious ascension of its blue volume and distant descent onto the Pacific Ocean. It formed a kind of receptacle, a brilliant illusion of space and possibility, and fifty thousand people arrived that year to empty themselves into it. It was the year Charlie Chaplin married a sixteen-year-old girl. There were more than a million people in Los Angeles. The motion picture business was luring rubes from every hamlet in America. A dream had been articulated and there was no reneging on its promise. The clouds above the city looked like frayed gauze, an aureole of sun illuminating the western contours. The clouds blew east and suddenly Griffith Park was filled with light.

Michael was prepared for war, sitting on the back of a Ford truck that had been outfitted with two lines of wooden benches bolted to the flatbed. Twelve men jostled pleasantly. Michael was happy for the bright emptiness of Los Angeles, the sparkling void of the ocean. The Ford laboured through the hills of Griffith Park. Above them the Hollywoodland sign undulated along the curves of Mount Lee, advertising a new housing development.

King Vidor was shooting his World War I epic,
The Big Parade
, in Griffith Park. Vidor was steeped in movies. He saw the world as film. During lunch one day, he mixed with the soldiers, an unassuming dark-haired man with a pipe, a contemplative Christian Scientist, a Texan who didn't match the bombast of his name. His picture wasn't about glory, he said, aware that some of the men were veterans. “I want the guts of war,” he told them. “I want the audience to leave the theatre and think they were in a war.” This movie wasn't going to be like the ephemera that filled the nation's theatres, short, disposable entertainment that was gone in a week and never remembered.
The Big Parade
would leave an impression; it would be, Vidor announced, American art, an art that would make millions.

Few of Michael's fellow soldiers had seen action. Sitting beside him was a boy from Minnesota, his cloudless expression broken by an incongruous black eye patch.

“Is that thing real?” one of the men asked the boy.

“Real enough, mister.”

“You don't need it though I'm saying.”

“Maybe I need it today.” The kid bristled slightly. They had been told not to shave but the kid's blond whiskers were invisible.

“But I tear that thing off,” the man continued, “I'm not
going to see some hole in your face where your eyeball used to be. I'm just going to see another blue eye, ain't I?” The man was about forty, and his stubble was grey. He took a drag of his cigarette and dropped it carefully on the dusty road. They had been warned about fires.

“Maybe it'll get me noticed,” the kid said. “Maybe I'll stand out.”

“I reckon Vidor found his next leading man. Then what, you get hitched to Mary Pickford?”

“Then I won't be forty years old bouncing on the back of a Ford for three bucks a day.”

“You watch your goddamn mouth, kid,” the man said, leaning forward aggressively, but then sagging back into his seat.

The sun and the slow lurching rhythm of the truck were soothing. A breeze came from the ocean. They were filming in the evening, arriving at four to get ready for six o'clock.

At the location, a small man in an argyle sweater vest walked in front of the hundred or so extras dressed as American soldiers. “The King wants humanity,” he boomed through the megaphone. “This is what the King wants.” He paced theatrically, an agitated walk twenty yards one way then turning to retrace his steps, an argyle panther. The sun caught his round spectacles and his eyes disappeared briefly, replaced by mirrors. “I have two pieces of advice,” he said. “Those of you who were
in
the war, I want to remind you that this is not war.
This
is a moving picture. Three men went to the hospital yesterday. Three. And for those of you who were
not
in the war:
This is a war
. Don't stand around like you're on line for a soda.” In the truck Michael had heard that Vidor was going to Texas to shoot epic battle scenes using the Second Division of the U.S. Army. But he needed
more intimate war scenes, and for them it was cheaper to shoot in the thousands of acres of Griffith Park.

The soldiers were given their instructions. They would move out of the trenches that had been dug by Mexican labourers and walk tentatively toward the trees. Explosives were concealed among the trees, safely percussive props that went off, the cue for some to die. Others would be victims of sniper fire. They would die in one of three prescribed ways: falling sideways, backwards, or stopping dead and pitching forward. “You, Blondie,” Argyle said to the Minnesotan, “you're dead.”

“Me?” he said. “I can't die.”

“We all die, kid, and take off that pirate patch.”

The blond stared resentfully as Argyle went down the line, separating the dead from the living. “You're dead. You. You.” They also needed men for corpses, men who would be lying in the woods before the cameras rolled, denied even the chance for a dramatic death. Argyle jabbed the air with an insistent finger, “Dead, dead, dead, dead, and dead.” The men had to advance with purpose, carrying their guns with a sense of familiarity, and the dead had to die convincingly. “Get to know your guns,” Argyle yelled. “I don't want to see you staring at them once we're rolling.”

Michael took in the sprawling set, a hundred people dotted over the scrub, equipment and lights being set up. It looked like a military operation. He was given a corporal's uniform and at dusk he advanced carefully through the woods and motioned for the plumbers, bartenders, and veterans to follow him. They spent five hours creeping through the woods, being killed by German snipers.

Near Amiens they had marched through woods on a warm autumn day, the sun coming through the leaves. Each
step was a separate act of will, moving forward, carefully waiting for the bullet that would land with precision in the centre of their faces. There would be a one-second delay between hearing the sound of the Mauser and the impact of the slug, the unfortunate head erupting in the dappled light. They were tortured by their own acquiescence, to march into a wood that had no strategic value and won at a terrible cost.