Truth and Bright Water (15 page)

“What I need is help with the bills.”

“And I’m keeping an eye out for some good tires.”

My father was still smiling when he got in his truck and dragged the Karmann Ghia out of Bright Water and headed for Truth. My mother went home as soon as my father left, but Lum and I stood at the corner of the band office and watched the road that ran to Prairie View and the border long after my father and his truck and our new car had disappeared.

My mother and I sit on the couch and watch television. The picture of her and auntie Cassie looks as though it is sewed on the quilt to stay. Towards one of the corners, near the feathers and the squares of woven quills, I can see where my mother has begun work on a purple and red Flying Bird. I’m guessing that this is probably auntie Cassie come home, but I know it’s too soon to tell.

S
oldier is a brave dog, and he likes to go places, but he does not like crossing the Shield on the ferry. The next morning, when we get to the river and he sees what’s up, he begins to cry, and he slows down until all he’s doing is shaking.

“Don’t be a baby.” It’s the same every time. I have to pick him up and put him in the bucket. “And no peeing.”

As soon as Soldier is in the bucket, he goes all stiff and stops drooling. He stands there with his legs braced and watches me as I take out the gloves and rock us off the platform. When Charlie Ron was alive, he used to come down to the river every night and lock the bucket up in case somebody got drunk and did something stupid. But people kept breaking the lock. Lum said some of the guys liked to pull the bucket to the middle of the Shield just to make out with their girlfriends. I thought it was a pretty dumb idea, but Lum told me it was a great place to fool around.

“The Toilet?”

“Kirby Scout took Celeste Plume to the middle of the river and told her to put out or get out and walk.”

“What’d she do?”

“You know the Plumes.”

“She kill him?”

“Naw, just cut all the buttons off his shirt.”

The view from the ferry is great, and as I pull the bucket across the river, I’m thinking that my father is probably wrong about the tourists who come west to take in the sights. There’s nothing scary out here, just the land and the river and the mountains. Out here, space is just the distance between towns, and the only thing you have to worry about is the weather or the next gas station being open.

“What about it?” I ask Soldier. “You see anything scary?” Which is the wrong thing to say. Soldier looks through the slats in the bucket, and he begins to whimper, and then he begins to pee.

“Jeez!”

I stop the bucket in the middle of the river and let the wind swing us back and forth. Soldier is trembling now, and he begins to whine and make his eyes droop so that they look as if they’re going to fall out of his head.

“Yeah, well, what about my shoes?”

Soldier doesn’t like me to stop, and he doesn’t like the bucket to swing. He starts growling, and then he begins to bark. He keeps this up until I grab the line and pull us across the rest of the way.

Lum isn’t at the tent, and he isn’t at Happy Trails. I walk around the park and look at the licence plates on the trailers. Besides the Cherokees from Georgia, there are folks from California and Utah and New Jersey. Three of the trailers are from Minnesota. Soldier circles each trailer, sniffing as he goes.

“Smells okay,” I say. Which isn’t exactly true. Soldier snorts and heads off across the prairies, loping slowly through the grass. I watch him until he disappears, and then I walk back to the tent and wait. Franklin has fixed the tear and you can hardly see it now. The concrete pads for the speakers have been poured, and the speakers have been set in place and wired. They stand at the corners of the tent, tall and black, facing out over the prairies, east, south, west, and north, looking for all the world like sentries guarding the camp against surprise attack.

I don’t see Rebecca right away. She’s sitting quietly inside the tent on one of the benches, looking at the ground.

“Hi,” I say. “You find your duck yet?”

“Not yet,” she says. “Was that your dog?”

“That was Soldier.”

“Dogs don’t like me.”

“Soldier likes everyone.” Which is mostly true.

Rebecca stands up and walks to the edge of the tent where the
shadows end and the sun begins. I look around for Soldier, but he’s nowhere to be seen. The wind is blowing as it always does at this time of the year, but right now it’s not serious.

“My mother made this dress.” Rebecca spins around. “Do you like it?”

“It’s cool.”

“She had to tear the cloth because they wouldn’t let her bring her scissors.”

“My mother’s making a quilt.”

“My father says we’ll buy a good pair of scissors once we get to Oklahoma.”

“Looks sort of like lace,” I say.

“Feathers,” says Rebecca. “I think the edges look like feathers.”

“So, where are your folks?”

“Down there,” says Rebecca. “They’re watching the buffalo get shot.”

The first corral is still there, but now a second corral has been built at the far end and the chute has been widened. The orange-plastic mesh has been stretched tight, and all along on both sides of the chute, junk cars have been set end to end to form a makeshift fence of metal and chrome.

“We heard they were killing the buffalo for their hides and leaving the meat on the ground to rot,” says Rebecca. “But we didn’t believe it.”

I can see my father’s U-Haul parked by the first corral and next to it is Franklin’s maroon pickup. Farther on and out of sight, I can hear the rattle of a motorcycle, but standing there in the wind and the sun, I can’t tell where the sound is coming from.

“There,” says Rebecca, and as she steps forward into the wind and the light, she seems to shimmer for a moment and fade. “That’s where you can shoot the buffalo.”

The tourists stand in a knot, watching the buffalo in the corral. A couple of them have climbed to the top of the fence, their cameras at the ready. Above the wind, I can hear the motorcycle again, but all I see is the prairies and the late morning colours that pool up and
flood the land. I shade my eyes. I know that the motorcycle is out there somewhere, and that if I wait long enough, it will leave the shadows and come into the light.

I figure that Rebecca can tag along with me until Lum shows up. Being from Georgia, she probably hasn’t seen stuff like buffalo and mountains, but when I turn back to see if she’s interested in any of these things, she’s gone. I look in the tent but it’s empty.

I hang around a while to see if she shows up, and then I drop down the side of the hill and head for the corral. The buffalo do not even turn to look at me as I walk by the fence. They stare stupidly straight ahead at the tourists. I could slip under the poles, slide through the grass on my belly, and slit their throats before they had a clue. Instead, I make low gruff noises and growl, but the wind is against me, and the buffalo are deaf to the danger behind them.

My father and Franklin are standing by Franklin’s truck. Franklin has his finger aimed at my father’s chest, and as he talks, he jerks the finger back and forth like a bird pecking at a worm.

“So, what the hell am I supposed to do?” says my father.

“Well, you sure as hell can’t dump it here,” says Franklin.

“We had a deal.”

“Not for this kind of shit,” says Franklin, and he gets in his truck.

“Grow up,” shouts my father. “This is the kind of shit that pays.” But Franklin is gone, fishtailing the truck across the flat, heading for the big tent.

The motorcycle appears out of nowhere. It comes in downwind, so I see it before I hear it. I watch as it loops across the prairies, and even before it is close enough for me to tell who’s on it, I know that it’s Lum.

“You’re late, cousin,” Lum yells at me as he swings in against the fence. The buffalo forget about the tourists for a moment and begin turning, following the motorcycle, as Lum circles the paddock. “My old man gone?” He stops the bike, swings a leg over the tank, and sits there like a movie star trying to sell aftershave or new cars.

“You just missed him.”

“My lucky day.” Lum pushes off the seat, limps over to the
paddocks, and comes back with a short, thick rifle. He tosses it to me and jumps on the motorcycle. “You ever see one of these?”

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“It shoots paint pellets.” Lum looks at me and smiles. “Get in.” He kick-starts the engine. I step into the sidecar and put the butt of the rifle on the floor between my legs. “Okay,” he says, and he drops the motorcycle into gear. “Let’s go hunting.”

“What do I do?”

“Just don’t shoot me.”

Lum circles around and rolls into the paddock. As soon as the buffalo see us, they begin backing up. Lum guns the engine hard. The tourists all have their cameras out and are draped over the fence, looking for a clear shot.

“We got to get them into the chute,” Lum shouts.

The buffalo are reluctant to go. Lum charges at them, and each time he does, they back up a little more quickly. “All right!” Lum yells over the wind and the roar of the motorcycle. The buffalo break into a run and go charging down the chute. I’ve never seen buffalo run before, and they’re faster than I would have imagined.

“Now!” shouts Lum.

“What?”

“Shoot them!”

Suddenly, everything is at full speed, the buffalo, the motorcycle, Lum, and me. The buffalo string out along the chute in two groups. Lum catches up to three of them right away, but as he pulls alongside, they veer off sharply, side-swipe the plastic mesh and the fence of cars, and crowhop to a stop. They turn quickly and face the motorcycle, ready to charge, but Lum ignores them, guns the engine, and passes them on the fly. Four other cows slide across the chute at a dead run, and Lum swings in behind them.

“Lock and load!” he shouts, and pulls alongside a large cow who is running with her tongue hanging out. Lum tries to hold her in against the fence, but each time he tries to close, she drops her head and angles in on the motorcycle.

“Shoot!”

I want to steady the rifle on the lip of the sidecar, but the ground
is too rough, and I have to bring the gun to my shoulder and try to time the pitches and rolls.

“Shoot!”

The first shot is high and sails off into the grass. The second shot hits the cow in the butt. The third misses low and in front. The fourth and fifth shots hit her high on the hump.

“Way to go!” yells Lum, and he swings the motorcycle back to the centre of the chute. As soon as we leave her, the cow slows down and stops, the white paint dripping down her shoulder. She swings her head from side to side as if she’s scolding me, and in that moment, she reminds me of my grandmother.

“Lock and load,” shouts Lum. “Lock and load!”

We scream down the chute, Lum bent over the handlebars, his hair snapping out behind him. The wind whips my eyes, and all I can see is the motion and the blur of colour. Every now and then, I feel the motorcycle leap back as a brown shape flashes alongside the bike. Then I hear Lum yell and I duck deeper into the sidecar, point the gun at the sky, and pull the trigger.

We paint three buffalo before they escape to the far paddock.

“What’d you think?” says Lum.

“Great!”

“White man’s wet dream,” says Lum. “The tourists are going to love it.”

“These the jobs?”

“What?”

“Driving the motorcycles.”

Lum turns the motorcycle around and points it towards the open prairies. “You think my old man would let either of us near a tourist with one of these?” He rolls the accelerator back in short, quick bursts, and the engine sucks in air like someone out of breath. “You ever think about just taking off?”

“Sure,” I say. “My mother and I were going to move to Toronto.”

Lum looks at me.

“We still have the brochures.”

I wait to see what he wants to do. He sits there on the motorcycle, staring off at the land. “Come on,” he says at last, and before
I can say yes or no, he kicks the bike into gear and we’re roaring across the prairies. I look over my shoulder, but the corrals and the tourists and the buffalo have already disappeared.

We head west until we get to the river, and then we turn north and follow the Shield into the foothills. I don’t know where we are going, and I’m not sure Lum does either. He runs the motorcycle along the coulee as close as he can get to the edge. It’s not too bad for me because the sidecar is firmly on the prairies, and it’s Lum who has to look down at the drop. Every so often, he speeds up, weaves out into the grass, and then leans hard left and pulls the bike back to the edge. Each time he does this, I hold my breath and pray that he doesn’t surprise both of us and ride the motorcycle off the side of the coulee and into the open sky.

When we finally come to a stop, I pull myself out of the sidecar as fast as I can, in case Lum changes his mind. Lum throws a leg over the bike, limps out to the edge of the coulee, and looks down at the river.

“Look around,” he says, and he takes his shirt off and tosses it into the grass. “This is the way it used to be.”

“In the old days, right?”

Lum unbuckles his jeans and lets them drop in a heap around his boots. “You see any houses?”

“Nope.”

“Any roads?” Lum bends over, takes off his boots, and steps out of his jeans. He’s not wearing underpants, and even though I’ve seen him beat up before, the bruises are a surprise. Some of them are little more than abrasions. Others are yellow, the result of glancing blows. But the one that runs down his right hip is the colour of blood, dark purple and black.

“Jesus, Lum. Your dad do this?”

“No tourists,” says Lum. “No railroads. No fences.” He scoops up some dirt in his hand and spits in it. He works it around until it’s mud, and then he draws his fingers across his face and chest.

“You been to the clinic yet?”

“You still dressed?” Lum turns to me and smiles. “Come on.” At first, he limps badly, the right leg stiff and painful, but as we walk
along the coulee, the hip loosens up and the limp begins to disappear. Every so often, I feel a piece of hard stubble or a cactus crunch under my foot, and I’m glad I have my boots on. If Lum steps on anything, he doesn’t show it. I look back towards Bright Water, but all I can see is the motorcycle. From a distance, you could mistake it for a bear sitting down or an elk kneeling in the grass.

Lum squats down at the end of the point and waits for me. In the distance, where the river turns and swings back into the land, the edge of a coulee has collapsed and part of the face has slid down the cut into the river bottom. “Landfill economics.”

I look again, and now I can see that it’s not a slide at all. The coulee hasn’t fallen away. It’s been cut back and levelled off, the dirt pushed over the sides and down the hill. Along the edges of the cut, you can see thick tire ruts in the soft earth.