Truth and Bright Water (2 page)

“Holy!” Lum is the first to move. He quickly crushes the cigarette and bends down and ties his shoes. “Time me,” he shouts, and he hands me the stopwatch. Lum drops down the side of the slope and heads for the base of the bridge. I’m right behind him for the first fifty yards, but there’s no way I can keep up the pace. Soldier charges past me and crashes through the chokecherries and the greasewood as he chases after Lum. I’m not slow, but by the time I get to the bridge, Lum is already up one of the concrete abutments.

“Get on the ladder,” Lum yells to me. “Tell me when you see her coming.”

There’s a safety ladder on one of the columns. I climb it until I can see both the bend in the distance and Lum moving out along a beam below me.

“You see her?”

“No!” I try not to look down. The water is nothing but a dark blur. And as it slides off the rock plates and is forced around the thick footings of the bridge, you can hear it hiss.

“Anything?”

“No!”

The moon comes out, and I watch the light dance on the water.

Now and then, a shadow is caught in the current, and for a moment, I think I can see a head or an arm. But it is never anything more than a standing wave or the water tumbling over rocks.

It is late when Lum finally stands up and makes his way back, and I come down the ladder.

“She must have gotten by us,” I say.

“No way.”

“So, where is she?”

We stand by the river in silence and listen to the water plunge into the channel.

“How was my time?”

I hand him the stopwatch. He looks at it for a moment and nods.

“Where’s Soldier?” I listen to see if I can hear him.

“Who cares,” says Lum. “Come on.”

The way along the bank is a dark twist of willows, mud, and undercuts, and at points, we are forced to retreat up into the coulee and come around from above. Or we have to drop into the river itself and walk the shallows. It would be easier to climb back up to the bluff and follow the road around and out to the Horns. But if the woman has survived the fall and floated to shore or has gotten hung up in the bushes, we’d never see her from the ridge.

“Maybe Soldier has found her.”

“That mutt couldn’t find his butt with his tongue.”

We walk the river all the way to the flat below the Horns. Every so often, we stop to search the water, looking for clues. We even try shouting just in case she’s injured, so she’ll know that rescue is close at hand.

“Lady!”

“Hey, lady!”

By the time we get to the flat, fog has started to form low on the water. Our runners are filled with mud and sand, and we have to sit on the bank and empty our shoes.

I’m starting to get cold. “Maybe she’s dead.”

“Off the bridge, she’d be dead for sure,” says Lum. “But we’ve gone off the Horns before, and we’re not dead.”

“We don’t go off the top. We go off the lower ledge.”

“I go off the top,” says Lum. “I go off the top all the time.”

I’m sure we’re not going to find anything in the dark and the fog, but I know telling Lum isn’t going to do any good. “So, what do we do now?”

“Look for footprints,” says Lum. “Current could have brought her in here.” Lum reaches into the water and comes up with a rubber glove and a couple of those sticks that doctors shove down your throat to make you gag. “How about this?” He blows up the glove until all the fingers are swollen and white, and taps on it with one of the sticks. It’s a dead, hollow sound.

“Christ,” I say. “Don’t touch it.”

“Landfill drum.” He ties the glove off and sets it afloat on the current. “Come on. Let’s go check out the view.”

The climb from the river bottom up to the Horns is long and slippery. In some places, we can grab clumps of grass and pull ourselves along. In other places, we have to dig out handholds and kick our toes into the side of the hill. Behind us, in the dark, I can hear the small avalanches of dirt and gravel rattling down the slope.

By the time we get to the top, we’re both tired. I lie down on my back in the moonlight. Lum picks up stones and skips them across the grass.

“You notice anything, cousin?”

I don’t move. “Like what?”

“No truck.” Lum skips another stone into the grass. “No music.”

The truck is gone. It had been sitting on the Horns with its lights on when the woman jumped into the river.

“Maybe we should tell the cops.”

“Sure,” says Lum. “They love a good Indian joke.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

“Remember what happened to Eddie Weaselhead?”

“That was a mistake.”

“Doesn’t make Eddie any less dead.”

Lum wanders out towards the high shelf. I lie back in the grass and watch the moon in the sky. The song is playing in my head and I’m trying to get rid of it when I hear Lum yell. I look up just in time to see him pull the gun out of his waistband and fire into the grass. The
shot skips through and clatters across the rock outcrop. Somewhere in the darkness, Soldier barks.

I’m on my feet in a flash. “Hey, be careful!”

“Damn dog tried to jump me.” Lum is crouched in the grass, the gun in his hand. “Come on. He’s got something.”

Off to the left, Soldier bursts out of the grass, runs across the rocks, and dives back into cover before Lum can find the trigger or the range.

“He’s just playing.”

We don’t find Soldier right away. He’s buried himself deep in the grass, but we can hear the low rumbling noises he makes in his throat. We can hear him grunting, too, and gagging, as if he’s trying to chew and swallow at the same time.

“Call him,” says Lum. “Tell him I won’t shoot him.”

“Tell him yourself.”

“He won’t believe me.”

When we finally find Soldier, he’s lying on his belly. His ears are back and his mouth is locked around something large. Lum leans forward to get a better look. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s just a ball,” I say.

Soldier stands up, growls, and drops the ball at his feet. As soon as it hits the ground, he snatches it up quickly, takes several steps back, glances at us, and drops it again.

“Look again, cousin,” says Lum.

Soldier rolls it over in the moonlight, and I can see that it’s not a ball at all.

“Is it human?”

“Not anymore.” Lum coaxes the skull away from Soldier and cleans the slobber off on the grass. Someone has looped a long red ribbon through the eye sockets. “Nice colour,” says Lum, and he wraps the ribbon around his finger.

“Where’d it come from?”

Most skulls you see in the movies are white and chalky. This one is soft yellow and shiny and smaller than I would have imagined. Lum lets the skull roll off his fingers. When it hits the end of the ribbon, he jerks his wrist and catches the skull on the bounce. “Maybe it’s not a skull,” he says. “Maybe it’s a yo-yo.”

Soldier stays low in the grass and watches the skull float above him.

“No dirt on it,” says Lum, “so he didn’t dig it up.”

“So?”

Lum holds the skull out and lets Soldier jump for it. “Makes you wonder what else she threw away.”

“The woman?”

“Who else?”

All the way back to the bridge, Soldier trots by Lum’s side, his ears up, his eyes watching every movement Lum makes. The chain-link fence across the entrance to the bridge is beginning to sag and flatten out in places. The “No Trespassing” sign has disappeared.

“You know what?” Lum leans against the wire. It sways under his weight. “It could have been my mum. She was always doing crazy stuff like that.”

Sometimes Lum remembers that his mother is dead, and sometimes he forgets. My mother says it’s probably best to leave it alone, that in the end, Lum will work it out for himself.

“Yeah,” says Lum, “it could have been her.” And he turns and scales the fence, swinging over the top and dropping down the other side. “You should get your mum to move back to Bright Water.”

“She likes it here.”

“She only moved to Truth because your father did.”

“They’re thinking about getting back together.”

“Your dad still messing around with Lucy Rabbit?” Lum tosses the skull into the air. Soldier barks and lurches forward, hitting the fence with his shoulder. Lum catches the skull and flips it back and forth between his hands.

“What about Indian Days?” I say. “Maybe your father could get the band to hire us.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. Help out at Indian Days. Do some work around the RV park.”

Lum smiles and jams the skull on the barrel of the gun and holds it up like a wand or a flag and waits, as if he expects something to happen. “Bunch of trailers from Georgia showed up at Happy Trails yesterday.”

“Okay,” I say. “We could show them around.”

“Cherokees. On their way to Oklahoma.”

“They’re going in the wrong direction.”

“Maybe they’re taking the scenic route.” Lum tests one of the planks with his foot. The vibration rumbles out into the night. “There’s this girl.”

“At Happy Trails?”

“She’s a little weird,” says Lum. “You ought to meet her.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re weird.” Lum moves onto the bridge. The plywood decking has already begun to weather, to twist and bubble up like pieces of thin meat in a hot pan.

“Better get back to the rez.” Lum holds the gun high over his head. Below, the fog hangs low and velvet on the river, but on the bridge, everything is star bright and clear. In the light, the skull shines like stone. “Go a few rounds with the old man before I shoot him.”

The planks turn and tremble as Lum shifts his weight, feeling for a rhythm in the wood. “It’s powwow time,” he shouts. “Old Agency drum, take it away!”

Soldier stands frozen by the fence, his ears arched as if at any moment he expects Lum and the skull to tilt and fall. But Lum moves gracefully, effortlessly along the girders, like a dancer, until the curve of the bridge begins its descent into Bright Water, and he vanishes over the edge.

W
hen I wake up the next morning, the record player is going and my mother is sitting at the kitchen table cutting an old shirt into pieces and stacking the pieces in piles. The shirt is blue with thin red stripes. It’s not one of mine, so it must be a shirt my father left behind.

“You call that music?”

“It’s the ‘Parigi, o cara’ from
La Traviata
,” my mother says, and she rips an arm out of the shirt and drops it on the floor. “Violetta sings this as she tries to get into her dress.”

“Sounds like Soldier when we leave him home.”

“And then she dies in the arms of Alfredo.”

Two or three mornings each week, before she opens the beauty shop, my mother goes out behind Santucci’s grocery and picks up any flowers that Mrs. Santucci hasn’t been able to sell. Most of the bunches are in pretty bad shape, but my mother trims the stems, cuts off the dead parts, and arranges them in a vase. Then she warms up the phonograph my father bought at a yard sale just before he left and loads a stack of records on the spindle.

Some of the songs are okay. I don’t mind “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from
Show Boat
, and parts of
The Desert Song
sound exciting.
Carmen
has a couple of good tunes and Soldier likes one of the pieces from
South Pacific
that sounds like a lullaby. But most of the songs are awful things, all about love and death and doomed painters and jealous bullfighters, in languages nobody understands.

The records belonged to my grandfather, who had gone to Italy for a war and had come home with a taste for operas and musicals,
The Student Prince
,
Tosca
,
Damn Yankees
,
La Bohème
. My mother knows all the songs by heart, and her voice blends in so well with the records that you can hardly tell them apart. She could have been an
actress, she likes to tell me, and I believe that this is true, for she moves around the beauty shop as if she knows where to place each foot, when to turn, and how to hold her head so that her hair catches the light that comes in through the plate-glass window. Some mornings, when the shop is empty, she’ll follow the music around until all the records have dropped. And then she’ll turn the phonograph off. With a quick, hard gesture that reminds me of my grandmother wringing the heads off chickens.

“Now that school’s out,” my mother says, “I guess you’ll be looking for something to do.”

There are no pans on the stove and I don’t smell anything tasty like sausages or bacon. The woman on the phonograph sounds as if she’s on her last legs. “What’s for breakfast?”

“The railroad might be hiring for the summer,” says my mother.

“Sausage?”

“You should check with Wally Preston over at the job gate.”

“Eggs would be okay.”

My mother takes the quilt from the basket and spreads it out across her lap. “Cereal’s in the cupboard,” she says.

“French toast?”

“Spoon’s in the drawer.”

“Lum and me found a skull up on the Horns.”

“I hope you left it there,” she says.

“Lum says it’s human.”

“I hope you didn’t let Soldier chew on it.”

“We saw a woman, too,” I say. “Guess what she did.”

“I hope you weren’t spying.”

“She jumped off the Horns into the river.”

My mother reaches into the quilt basket and takes out a tin box. Inside are all sorts of odds and ends. Paperclips, coloured stones, pieces of fur, candles, buttons, fish bones, sticks, glass, and bits of dry stuff that look as if they should have been thrown out long ago.

“I have to go over to Bright Water after work.” My mother takes a coloured stone out of the box and tucks it into a piece of netting.

“Granny’s?”

“You don’t have to come.” My mother loops the needle through
the netting and draws the thread tight against the material. She doesn’t look at me. She keeps her eyes on the quilt.

“What about supper?” I say.

“There’s food in the refrigerator.”

“How about we order a pizza?”

My mother shakes her head and sighs the way she does when Soldier runs off and doesn’t come back for a couple of days or when I forget to wash my dishes or clean my room. I’m used to it, and it doesn’t affect me the way it does other people who don’t know her as well as I do.

“What would you think,” she says, “if I went away for a day or so?”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Oh, just to get away,” she says. “The shop wears me out after a while.”

“How about Edmonton?” I say. “We could go to the mall.”

The bell on the front door jingles, and I hear someone step into the shop. My mother pushes the quilt to one side of the couch and stands up. “When you see your father,” she says, “ask him about the car.”

The phonograph clicks and a new record drops onto the turntable. I sit in the kitchen for a moment and listen to a guy whose name I can’t remember start to sing about how tough knights are supposed to be and what good-looking women want and how much fun it is to live in Camelot.

When I get out to the shop, Lucy Rabbit is sitting in the chair, her head done up in yellow plastic wrap. She has her earphones on and you can hear some of the music leaking out the sides of her ears. Soldier is lying on the floor watching my mother pat Lucy’s hair into a lump.

“Of course, there are safer ways to make a living,” says Lucy over the music, “but you have to admit that smuggling’s sort of romantic.”

“He doesn’t do that anymore,” says my mother.

“I saw a movie about smuggling,” says Lucy. “With Robert Mitchum.”

“Who?”

“No, it’s the Stones.” Lucy rocks her head from from side to side. “Hey, hey, you, you,” sings Lucy, “get off of my cloud.”

Lucy Rabbit carries a picture of Marilyn Monroe around with her in her purse. She got it out of an old magazine and had it sealed in plastic at the Coast to Coast store so it wouldn’t get bent or torn. It’s a famous picture, I guess, because my father and Skee Gardipeau and even Miles Deardorf all know about it. In the photograph, Marilyn is standing with her dress blowing up around her legs. She’s trying to push her dress down, but she has a smile on her face as if she’s having a good time or is really annoyed with everything and just wants to go home.

Lucy has a theory that Marilyn Monroe was really Indian and that she was adopted out when she was a baby. Lucy likes to hold the picture up next to her face. “Take a good look,” she says. “What do you see?”

I guess I can see a general resemblance, and I suppose if someone were to look at Lucy and the photograph long enough, they might mistake the two of them for sisters. Which is why Lucy wants blonde hair. So she can look exactly like Marilyn.

“Can’t do much about the tan,” Lucy tells my mother each time she comes to the shop, “so let’s work on the hair.”

Lucy has been coming to my mother for several years trying to get her hair to turn blonde, but the closest my mother has been able to get to the kind of baby-soft yellow-white dandelion hair that Marilyn has is flaming orange.

“She was probably Cree,” says Lucy, “or maybe Ojibwa.”

My mother tells Lucy that she doesn’t think Lucy’s hair will ever go blonde, that it’s so black to begin with it probably hasn’t got a clue what blonde looks like. And even after my mother has cut Lucy’s hair so it has the right general shape and set, it looks more like a spool of copper wire or a rusty scrub pad.

“I’ve never heard that she’s Indian,” my mother says whenever Lucy brings up the subject.

“Well, you’d want to keep something like that a secret, now, wouldn’t you.”

Soldier comes over and puts his head in my lap. He’s heard all
Lucy’s ideas about Marilyn Monroe before and would rather go out and play.

“What are you up to these days?” Lucy says to me.

“Not much.”

“You got a girlfriend yet?”

“Lum and me saw a woman jump off the Horns last night.”

Lucy slips her hands out from under the apron and fingers an imaginary guitar. “Jumping Jack Flash,” she sings, “he’s a gas, gas, gas!”

At first, the orange was a little weird, but because no one else in Truth or Bright Water had hair anywhere near that particular shade, it sort of made Lucy a celebrity. Lum took to calling her Bugs Bunny because, he said, she looked like a carrot.

“What’s up, Doc?” he’d say whenever he saw her.

“Ah,” Lucy would say whenever she saw him, “it’s the wascally wabbit.”

And she was easy to see. You could spot her all the way across the football field every morning on her way to work at the band health centre, and you could follow her as she roamed up and down the produce aisles at Safeway. Even in the Frontier, when the lights dropped way down for a night scene or a scary moment, you could see her hair flash in the dark as her head bobbed over a tub of popcorn and a medium soft drink.

“You hear about Carol?” Lucy is nodding her head to the music and tapping the arm of the chair.

“Carol Millerfeather?”

“The very same,” says Lucy.

“She getting married?”

“Now wouldn’t that be a shocker,” says Lucy. “Nope, she got one of those grants. She’s going to try to start a community theatre group right here in Truth.”

“Theatre?” says my mother.

Lucy shakes her head. “As if Carol didn’t have enough to worry about.”

Once, my mother ordered a special peroxide all the way from Montreal. She worked it into the hair, wrapped the hair up in a rubber bag, and let everything sit for an hour. The bag was dark blue
so you couldn’t see what was happening inside. We all thought that Lucy was finally going to get the blonde hair she’d always wanted, so we were disappointed when my mother took the bag off.

On the positive side, her hair was a brighter and cleaner orange than before, as if someone had taken the time and effort to scrape off the tarnish and polish each strand. But it wasn’t blonde, and in the end, that was all that counted.

Lucy slides the earphones off her ears and leans forward. “Saw your sister the other day,” she says to my mother. “When did she get back?”

“You have to start taking better care of your hair,” says my mother quickly, but the cat is already out of the bag.

“Auntie Cassie?”

My mother takes a bottle of conditioner off the shelf and sets it on the edge of the sink so Lucy can see it.

“Auntie Cassie’s back?”

My mother doesn’t hold with lying, but sometimes pulling the truth out of her is harder than dragging Soldier away from a telephone pole. Sometimes you can see the answer in her face. Other times you have to guess.

“Is that why you’re going to granny’s?”

“There’ll be lots of time for visiting.”

“I want to come,” I say. “It’s no big deal. I’ve seen you guys fight before.”

“We don’t fight.” My mother pushes on Lucy’s hair. It moves around in the wrap, sliding from side to side like cooking lard on a warm pan. “Sometimes we disagree.”

“She’s going to put on a play,” says Lucy. “Guess which one.”

“Carol?”

“What about auntie Cassie?”

“Of course, Carol,” says Lucy. “Who’ve we been talking about?”

“Something by Shakespeare?” says my mother.

“God, no!” says Lucy.

“When do we go?”

“A Neil Simon comedy?”

Lucy smiles and gulps down a mouthful of air as if she’s getting set to dive under water. “
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
!”

My father says that Lucy has a laugh that sounds like a herd of crows stampeding through a minefield. Lucy always catches me off guard with that laugh. “But she’s going to change it,” says Lucy. “Bring it up to date.”

“I don’t know,” says my mother. “I think she should start off with something everyone knows.”

“Indians,” says Lucy. “Instead of dwarfs, Carol is going to use Indians.”

Lum says Lucy wants to be Marilyn Monroe because no one gives a damn about Indians but everybody likes blonds. Even Indians. “You ever see anybody famous who wasn’t blond?”

I pointed out that Sylvester Stallone wasn’t blond and neither was Jim Carrey, but Lum said that being white was the same as being blond.

“Franklin’s got the powwow tent up,” says Lucy. “Bright Water is starting to jump. A bunch of people from Georgia pulled into Happy Trails the other day and have already set up their trailers.”

“Georgia’s a long way to come,” says my mother.

“Cherokees,” says Lucy. “Can you beat that?”

“You going this year?”

“Always go,” says Lucy. “Indian Days are the only time we make any money without having to fill in a form.”

“Elvin said he did pretty good last year.”

“Lucille and Teresa Rain are praying for Germans,” says Lucy, and she raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Germans and Japanese.”

My mother lifts the edges of the plastic wrap and the stink of peroxide floods the room. Soldier drops to the floor and tries to bury his nose in the wall. “Too bad the landfill project fell through.”

“Now that was one of Franklin’s dumber ideas,” says Lucy. “Using Turtle Coulee as a garbage dump.”

“Could have used the jobs,” says my mother.

“All that junk was starting to slide into the river.” Lucy makes a face and squeezes her lips together. “You got any idea what’s buried out there?”

My mother finishes Lucy’s hair and puts her under the dryer, but you can see the colour hasn’t moved an inch. Lucy snugs the earphones into her ears and closes her eyes. My mother gathers up
the towels and takes them back to the washing machine. I follow her and stand by the door and wait. “All right,” she says, finally. “You can come if you want to.” She leaves the towels in a pile on the floor and goes back to the kitchen. She sits down on the couch and pulls a corner of the quilt across her lap.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she says.

“You want a root beer?”

“That would be nice, honey.”

“Can I have one?”

I get the root beer from the refrigerator. My mother goes to work on the quilt, stitching pieces of the shirt over part of the pattern that I thought she had finished.