Truth and Bright Water (3 page)

One time, Miles Deardorf took a picture of Lucy with the Polaroid camera he uses for taking pictures of houses, and Lucy sent it in to a Marilyn Monroe look-alike contest that a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles was sponsoring. There were all sorts of prizes including an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood and a small part in a movie. Lucy told my mother she didn’t care about the trip or the part in the movie, but that a big-screen television would be nice. “They’re giving ten of them away,” Lucy told me. “I like my chances.” She didn’t win the grand prize or the television, but she did get a free video of
Some Like It Hot
, which Lucy said was Marilyn at her best.

“You going to try out for a part in Carol’s play?” I ask my mother.

“Maybe.”

“You should,” I say. “You’d make a good Snow White.”

This is the right thing to say. My mother starts to smile. “Snow White’s the lead.”

“Snow White has dark hair,” I say. “And you’ve got dark hair.”

“Might be nice to have a Prince Charming.”

“That’s
Sleeping Beauty
,” I say, “or
Cinderella.
”

My mother smooths the quilt and runs her fingers over the buttons. She leans back, closes her eyes, and begins humming to herself. Out in the shop, Lucy sits under the dryer reading a magazine. She rocks back and forth in the chair mouthing the words to “Satisfaction,” while the dryer whistles around her head like a spring storm.

A
week after the Sacred Word Gospel people left Truth for Prairie View, Miles Deardorf put on his gold blazer, drove out to the bluff in his white Lincoln, and nailed a “For Sale” sign up on the side of the church. For the next few months or so after that, people from Missoula or Helena or Great Falls would show up and begin talking about turning the church into a pottery studio or a bed and breakfast or a weekend retreat for business people from Denver and Los Angeles.

But that wasn’t what happened.

I was in Railman’s with my father when Miles stopped in to announce the sale. “Sold the damn thing,” Miles told Skee Gardipeau and everybody else who was at the counter.

“Didn’t know you could sell a church,” said Skee.

“Hell,” said Miles, “I can sell anything.”

“So, who’s the lucky winner?” said my father.

Miles stood up and straightened his blazer. “Monroe Swimmer.”

“Monroe Swimmer!”

“The very same.”

“Thought he was dead,” said Skee.

“Got a call,” said Miles, “from his agent.”

“His
what?
”

“In Toronto.”

Everyone started smiling, and Skee asked Miles if he was putting something up his nose again, besides his finger.

“Evidently,” said Miles, and he began to smile, too, “the big chief’s got a wad of money and a fine eye for real estate.”

“So, what’s he going to do with a beat-to-shit church?” said Skee.

“Who knows,” said Miles, looking at my father. “And who cares. Big-time Indian artist like him. Maybe he’s going to tear the damn thing down and put up a tipi.”

As soon as word that the church had been sold got around, everyone in Truth and Bright Water began talking about Monroe Swimmer. Lee Patterson at the
Truth Free Press
remembered Monroe as a series of minor offences: shoplifting batteries at the Coast to Coast store, sneaking into the Frontier without paying, painting graffiti on the sides of boxcars.

Lucille Rain, who ran a gift shop on the reserve with her sister Teresa, remembered Monroe as a bit of a joker. One time, she told us, he borrowed a tuba from the Mormon church over in Cardston and got his auntie to make him a pair of short pants out of elk hide with elk hide suspenders. And when Indian Days came around and the crowds of tourists were everywhere, he marched through the booths and the tipis, puffing on the tuba, pretending to be the Bright Water German Club.

“He said it was the least he could do,” said Lucille, “seeing as how Germans were so keen on dressing up like Indians.”

Gabriel Tucker, who owned Tucker’s Sporting Goods, liked to tell the story about the time Monroe took a couple of barricades from a construction site and blocked off Division Street at the level crossing. It took everybody an hour or so to figure out it was a joke, and by then the traffic was backed up on both sides of town.

“It was pretty funny,” Gabriel told us, “as long as you weren’t in a hurry to get somewhere.”

But there was also a darker side to Monroe. According to Skee, he liked doing dangerous things like hopping freight cars as they came out of the yards on the fly and riding them all the way to Prairie View and back, or running the rapids below the bridge on an inner tube during spring flood. One winter, Skee watched him slide all the way across the Shield on his belly before the river had completely iced over, just because Sherman Youngman had told him it couldn’t be done.

“If the new bridge had been there back then,” Skee told us, “he would’ve jumped off the damn thing just to see how long it took to get to the river.”

Some of the stories were probably true and some of them were probably false, but everyone who knew Monroe agreed on one
thing. He could draw. When he was in high school, he made extra money every Christmas painting reindeer and Santa Clauses on store windows, and each summer, during Indian Days, he sold pen-and-ink landscapes to the tourists who came through. He had even gotten a scholarship to the art program at Wild Rose Community College and would have graduated if he hadn’t left in the middle of his second year and gone to Toronto.

Why Monroe left Truth and Bright Water was a mystery. Lucille Rain figured it had to have something to do with women or money, because almost everything else that happened in the world did. There was the story that Monroe had gotten someone pregnant, but Lucille said you shouldn’t confuse rumours with gossip and that rumours shouldn’t be repeated. What intrigued Lucille the most was what Monroe might have done once he got to the city. She was pretty sure that Toronto had more Indians than it wanted already.

“Edna says they’ve got Ojibwas coming out their ears and that they’re up to their bellies in Mohawks and Crees.”

Lucille was sure Monroe would do all right in the city because he had a sweet mouth. But she wasn’t sure that there were many people, even in Toronto, who were interested in buying prairie landscapes or paintings of reindeer and snowmen.

Skee said he wasn’t surprised when Monroe left. “Nothing much to keep him. Family’s only good reason to stay in Truth and Bright Water.” Skee figured Monroe had gone to Toronto because no one knew him there and because, in a city, there were lots more interesting ways to kill yourself than staring at the bottom of a beer can or breaking through thin ice.

Miles Deardorf had arrived in Truth long after Monroe left, so Miles never knew him. But when Monroe bought the church and everybody began talking, no one came up with more stories about Monroe than Miles. My father said that Miles had real estate friends in Toronto who knew Monroe, and that Miles probably made up the rest of the stories as he went along.

“Some people are like that,” my father told me. “You can bet it comes in handy selling houses.”

When Monroe first arrived in Toronto, Miles told us, he got a job
at the Royal Ontario Museum. On weekends, he would go down to Queen Street and paint animals on brown butcher paper and try to sell them for a few dollars. But there was already an Indian artist in Toronto who had made a name for himself painting on butcher paper, and even though Monroe’s stuff was pretty good, he couldn’t give it away.

Then one day (if you believed everything Miles said), Monroe got really angry, walked down the block to a popular restaurant on Queen Street, and began painting a pack of wolves eating a moose on the front window. Some of the customers thought it was exciting, seeing a real artist at work while they were eating, but the owner was put off by all the blood and the crushed bones, and called the police. When they arrived to talk to Monroe, he began throwing paint at them and fending them off with his brushes. The police beat him up, confiscated his paintings, and tossed him in jail for creating a disturbance.

“Couldn’t really paint worth a damn,” Miles told us. “But, hey, did that stop Picasso?”

The next thing anyone heard, Monroe was in a warehouse on King Street, painting giant canvases filled with swollen, shadowy figures stuffed into distorted police cars and army tanks, chasing pastel animals and neon Indians at murderous angles across long, dark stretches of prairie landscape.

Miles figured Monroe got lucky, that he landed in Toronto just as being an Indian was becoming chic, and that if he hadn’t been Indian, he would have been sucking up soup at the Salvation Army. And maybe that was true. But whatever the reason, Monroe’s paintings began to sell, and in no time at all, according to Miles, Monroe was rich.

“At the very least,” Miles told us over coffee at Railman’s, “a person should have to work for the money they get.”

“What about hockey players?” said my father.

“My point exactly,” said Miles.

Miles’s stories were pretty lively and full of energy, and when he got to telling them, everyone who was listening would nod and say yes, that sounded like Monroe all right.

Monroe bought the church in the fall. The following spring, two
large moving vans pulled into the Big Sky Truck Stop and one of the drivers came to the counter, roused Beth Mooney out of her copy of the
Truth Free Press
, and asked her how he could get to the old Methodist church.

“Looks like you’ve got a load,” Beth told him, and she folded the newspaper into fourths so she could talk and read at the same time.

“Almost didn’t make the scales,” said the driver.

“All that for Monroe Swimmer?”

“Who knows?” said the man. “We just drive the trucks.”

Beth was on the phone before the driver got back in his truck, and by the next day, everybody began looking around for signs of Monroe. Miles drove out to the bluff a couple of times, just to check on the property, and came back to report that, so far as he could tell, there was no one at the church. Then one night, about two weeks after the moving trucks arrived, the lights in the church went on.

Nobody went up to the church right away to say hello to Monroe, and Monroe didn’t come into town. By the end of the second week, when he hadn’t made an appearance, people began to talk.

“Sure as hell no law says he has to be neighbourly,” Miles told my father.

“That’s right,” said my father. “Some artists like to be hermits.”

“Maybe he’s one of your ‘reserved’ Indians,” said Miles.

“For all anybody cares,” said Skee, “he can stay up there until the second coming.”

“Maybe he has some ‘reservations,’” said Miles.

Skee told Miles that we all got the joke, that it was a dumb joke, the kind of dumb joke real estate agents and used-car salesmen told all the time, and to shut the hell up.

“Artists are like that,” said my father. “That’s what artists do.”

After the first month, Miles drove out to the church with a bottle of wine to welcome Monroe to the community.

“If he’s there,” Miles told Skee, “he’s not answering the door.”

“You look in any of the windows?”

“It’s private property,” said Miles.

“What he means,” said my father, “is that the windows are too high off the ground for him to see in.”

“He’s got to be there,” said Skee. “You can see his lights at night.”

“Could be an electric eye,” said Miles. “Soon as night comes, the lights go on, so people think you’re home. You can buy them anywhere. He’s probably in Toronto right now having a great dinner at some fancy restaurant.”

“You don’t like the food around here,” said Skee, “you can always go to Toronto, too.”

Monroe Swimmer was the topic of conversation for the next couple of weeks, and then people turned back to more immediate issues such as dry land farming and the bridge. And in all that time, no one noticed that Monroe had got out his brushes and had begun to paint the outside walls of the church.

Monroe began with the east wall first, and because that wall faced over the prairies and because you couldn’t see it from Truth or Bright Water, no one knew anything was happening until Joanne Virone and her sister Christine came back from a shopping trip in Prairie View and noticed what Monroe had done.

But by then it was too late.

F
or the most part, Division Street runs east and west through Truth, but like the river, it doesn’t run straight. It comes into town from the south, turns west, and follows the tracks to the level crossing. Then it heads north for half a mile, turns east, and runs straight until it dead-ends in front of the fire hall. All of which can be confusing for tourists and other people who come to town for the first time because, essentially, there are two Division Streets, one that is north of the tracks and one that is south of the tracks. For example, my father’s shop is on Division Street South along with Safeway, Tucker’s Sporting Goods, Deardorf’s real estate office, and the Coast to Coast store, while my mother’s shop, Railman’s, Santucci’s grocery, and the Frontier theatre are all on Division Street North.

Soldier and I duck in behind Railman’s, cut across the train tracks, and head for my father’s shop to see what he’s doing and to tell him about the woman and the skull. The lights are on and the Karmann Ghia is still sitting at the side of the building and it’s pretty easy to tell that it hasn’t been moved. When my father first got the car, he threw a piece of yellow plastic over it and tied everything down with green rope. But over the months, the wind and the rain and the snow have forced the plastic down around the seats, leaving the remains of a dry lake under the dash.

My father is working at the band saw and is surprised to see me. “Something wrong?” His eyes are hard slits as if the light in the room is too bright.

“No, everything’s fine,” I tell him.

“Right.” My father hits the switch on the band saw and brushes off his jeans. “Don’t you have school?”

“It’s summer now.”

“That’s right.” My father waits for a moment. “Your mother send you?”

“No.”

“Just bored, huh?”

My father is a great believer in coincidence and in fate. Good luck. Bad luck. Things coming in threes. Destiny. He has an old deck of playing cards, and every so often, he takes them out and tells fortunes. Sometimes he does a little smuggling. But most of the time he’s a carpenter. There is nothing he can’t make out of wood. He’s famous for his animal mirrors but he makes other things, too. Benches, tables, birdhouses, doghouses, fancy signs.

“So, how you doing?” he says.

Bowls, music boxes, duck whistles, picture frames, walking sticks, cribbage boards, napkin rings. Rosewood toothpicks.

“Fine.”

Russian olive golf tees.

“How’s the dog?”

“He’s fine.”

Sometimes, if business is good, he gives me a couple of bucks for the matinee at the Frontier. Or we talk. “How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine, too.”

Most of the stuff my father makes, he makes out of pine or oak or cedar or fir. Sometimes, when he has a little extra money, he buys pieces of special wood that come from places like South America or Africa.

“She ask about me?”

“All the time,” I say. “She asked about the car, too.”

“Now don’t that beat all,” says my father. “I was just thinking about that the other day.”

“Still waiting for parts, right?”

“Takes a while,” says my father. “You wouldn’t believe how hard that foreign stuff is to get.” He goes to his work table. “What do you think of these?” There are about a dozen wooden figures arranged in a circle on the workbench. I can’t tell what they are supposed to be, but they sort of look like dogs.

“Neat.”

“I saw an advertisement for the same sort of thing, only carved out of stone. You know how much the guy gets for them?”

“No.”

“One hundred and fifty dollars. You believe that? One hundred and fifty dollars!”

“For a dog?”

My father picks up one of the figures and turns it over in his hand. “It’s not a dog. It’s a coyote. See, it’s howling at the moon.”

“Neat.”

“Everybody’s going crazy over traditional Indian stuff. I figure I can sell these for fifty bucks as fast as I can make them.”

I pick up one of the coyotes. There isn’t much to it. Just wood and two tiny black stones for the eyes. On the bottom of the coyote, my father has signed his name.

“You got to do that,” he says, “so they know it’s authentic.”

“Hundred and fifty bucks for a stone coyote?”

“No. That guy makes turtles. But you know what he does?”

I shake my head.

“He gets these little cards printed up. On the front is an explanation about the turtle and what it symbolizes.”

“So you know what you got.”

“That’s it. And on the back, there is a write-up about the artist. The guy with the turtles signs everything with his Indian name. Clever, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Figured I’d put my treaty number on the card so there’s no question.”

“About what?”

“A lot of this stuff comes out of Japan and Taiwan, so it’s hard to tell unless you got a card.” My father moves the coyotes so they all face out. “What do you think?”

“Great.”

“Figure I’ll make about two hundred or so, take out an ad in a couple of magazines, and sit back. With any luck, the money will pour in.”

“Just like the guy with the turtles.”

“Right.”

“How’d you do with the squirrel feeders?”

“Not so good. Couldn’t figure out a way to keep the screw from turning.” My father smiles and grabs me in a headlock. “You hungry?” I can feel his knuckles on my head.

“Sure,” I say, and I try to stomp on his foot. But he’s too fast.

“Me, too,” my father says and lets me go. “This about your mother?”

“No.”

“I heard she has a boyfriend.”

“She does?”

“You’d tell me if she did, right?”

“Sure.”

My father brushes the coyotes off the table and into a shoebox. “You going to give me a hint?”

“It’s sort of about a woman.”

“Okay,” my father says, and he fakes a jab at my stomach. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. You hungry?”

When we get to Railman’s, Miles Deardorf and Gabriel Tucker are at the counter arguing about a hockey game. My father slides onto a stool near the end by the jukebox and I follow him. We sit there for a moment and wait. “Hey, Skee,” my father shouts. “Where the hell are you?”

Skee Gardipeau sticks his head out the pass-through. He’s a large man and his head just fits. He always frowns, and he’s frowning now.

“What’s the special?”

“Same as always, Elvin,” says Skee.

“How about two specials then.”

Skee wrinkles his nose as if he’s going to sneeze. “You want that with potatoes and corn or with corn and potatoes?”

“Maybe with potatoes and corn.” My father smiles and elbows me gently.

Skee lumbers out of the kitchen. He stops at the pass-through and shouts the order back into the kitchen. Then he comes over to where we are sitting. “That chair finished yet?”

“Almost done, Skee.”

Three or four flies are twitching on the counter. Skee flicks them away with a rag. “Like to sit in it before the summer’s out.”

“You can count on me.” My father takes three of the coyotes out of his pocket. “Hey, what do you think of these?”

Skee picks up a coyote, looks at it, and snorts. “What the hell is it?”

“It’s a coyote. You ever see all that shit they advertise in the sports magazines?”

“Like fishing lures?”

“That’s right.”

“This ain’t a fishing lure.”

“No, it’s a coyote.”

“‘Cause if it’s a lure, it ain’t going to work.”

“There’s this guy who sells stone turtles,” says my father. “He gets a hundred and fifty bucks a pop.”

Skee leans on the counter and sags onto his forearms. “This one of those Indian things?”

“There’s good money in it,” says my father. “Fifty bucks apiece. Easy.”

Skee puts the coyote on the Formica and squints at it.

“Twenty-five?”

“I don’t know, Elvin,” Skee says. “You’re beginning to remind me of Monroe.”

“Hell, Skee, Monroe’s an artist.” My father turns to me and grins. “This is business.”

“How come they lean to one side?”

“It’s a coyote,” says my father. “Did I tell you that?”

The specials arrive. The potatoes are thick and full of lumps. The corn is tough and shiny and mixed up with pimentos and bits of green pepper. My father presses the corn into the potatoes with his fork and looks at me.

“How’s the chicken?”

“Pretty good.”

“The secret to good fried chicken,” says my father, “is in the salt.”

Skee comes out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a magazine under his arm. “So, what’s this kid of yours going to do when he grows up?”

“Beats me,” says my father. “Better ask his mother.”

“Deardorf figures his kid’s going to be an accountant.” Skee pours my father another cup of coffee and sets the pot down in front of me. “That’s the way to do it, all right.”

“What’s that?”

“Aim low,” says Skee. “Avoid disappointment.”

Skee and my father have a good laugh, and I laugh along, too.

“How old’s he now?” says Skee. “Thirteen?” He puts the magazine on the counter. It’s one of those men’s magazines. I’ve seen them before and they’re pretty neat.

“Fourteen,” says my father.

“I’m fifteen,” I say. “My birthday was last week.”

“That’s right,” says my father.

“So, what’d your old man get you?”

My father smiles at Skee and puts his arm around my shoulders. He reaches over and flips the magazine to the centrefold. “Jesus,” he whispers to me. “What do you think about that?”

We eat the rest of our lunch in silence. The coyotes sit on the counter. My father begins humming to himself. I push the chicken around my plate and try to think of ways to tell the story of the woman and the skull so that it won’t sound stupid and made up.

My father wipes his plate with a biscuit, pushes back, and slides off the stool. “Stay put,” he says. “I’ll be right back.” He’s out the door before I can say anything.

Skee sees him leave and comes back over. “Your old man desert you again?”

“Nope,” I say. “He’ll be right back.”

“Tell him to hurry up and build that chair, would you?” Skee picks up one of the coyotes by the head and looks at it.

“Pretty good, huh?”

Skee lays the coyote on its side and flicks it with his finger. It spins in a tight circle, bumps up against the coffee cup, and slides into the other coyotes. “You know how they kill dogs?”

“Who?”

“Coyotes.” Skee wipes his hands on his apron. “They pretend that
they’re hurt or scared. So, the dog starts to chase them, thinks it’s going to be easy.”

“Coyotes are sort of traditional.”

“Pretty soon the dog is tired.” Skee looks at me and begins to laugh. “And that coyote turns around slick as spit and cuts the dog’s throat.”

I look at Skee, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to laugh, too, so I just smile. Skee scoops my father’s plate off the counter and dumps it into a plastic tub. “So,” he says, sucking his lips in, “what you been up to?”

“Nothing much.”

Skee puts the magazine on the counter and turns the page. There’s a picture of a woman rubbing soap all over her body. “You got a girlfriend yet?”

“Nope.”

“But you’re looking, right?”

“I’m looking for a job. Lum’s looking, too.”

“Lots of girls in Bright Water.” Skee leans against the ice cream freezer.

“We might try the railroad.”

“Sure,” says Skee. “Railroad always likes to hire a bunch of Indians in the summer.”

“Cleaning boxcars, right?”

“You know why that is?”

“Nope.”

“‘Cause they can’t find a bunch of whites dumb enough to do the work.” Skee closes the magazine and rolls it into a club.

“I’m saving up for a car.”

Skee lowers his eyes. I can see the rolled magazine twitching in his hand. “If those assholes hadn’t screwed up the bridge, there’d be lots of work for everyone.” His arm snaps forward and the magazine explodes on the counter. “You know what I mean?” He turns the magazine over and checks the bottom. There’s nothing left of the flies but a few pieces and a bloody skid mark on the formica.

I sit at the counter and wait for my father, and I try to imagine
who it was that fell into the river that evening, and what she had in mind. And where she went. My father bangs in through the door with a smile on his face and drops a twenty dollar bill on the counter. “Keep the change,” he shouts at Skee.

I walk with him back to his truck. “I’ve got some cheques coming in,” he says. “You know what that means?”

“Money for mom?”

“What the hell does she need money for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ever been hungry?”

“Nope.”

“And she’s got the shop, right?” My father takes a box out of his pocket. “Look, next time you come by, we’ll make some time and have that talk.” He smiles and ruffles my hair. “About women.”

“Maybe we could practise my driving.”

“Hell, yes,” he says. “You’re almost a man.” My father looks up and down the street. “In the meantime,” he says, “use these,” and he presses the box into my hand. “Happy birthday, son.” My father turns and leaves me standing in front of Railman’s. “Don’t worry,” he shouts as he gets in his truck. “There’re instructions in the box.”

As he drives away, I remember the coyotes. They are still sitting on the counter. I look in the window just as Skee comes out of the kitchen and dumps my plate into the tub. He sees me and nods. Then he picks up the money and drags a rag across the counter, pulling the pieces of corn and the gravy and the chicken fat and the coyotes over the edge and into the garbage.