Canada (29 page)

“No, sir,” I said.

He smiled, then the smile vanished off his face as if he was uncertain about something that had to do with me. He had a dent in his chin that showed when he smiled. His complexion was smooth and pale. He was unusual looking. “There aren’t any of those anyway,” he said, and began turning his hat around in his fingers, as if he was appraising me. His gaze rose above my shoulder toward the stucco shack where I’d slept. “Are you accommodated in your little house. Over there?” He spoke that way—as if each word was chosen specifically.

I was sweating down my cheek. I looked around at the terrible shack. A plank shed sat in the weeds beyond it. I knew this was a privy. A large white dog stood outside, facing the door, wagging its tail. A silver whirligig had been placed by the side of it, which meant Charley used the privy. My father always told jokes and stories about privies. They stank and you used the phone book for your paper and never had privacy. I’d never thought I’d have to use one. I didn’t want to go back in the stucco shack. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d . . .”

“You can move things around inside just as you please. Some of those boxes are mine,” Arthur Remlinger said, still turning his hat. “You won’t be easy for somebody to find there, if that’s our goal. No one’ll bother you.” He rubbed his ear, which was large, with the heel of his hand. He seemed uncomfortable now. “Fort Royal’s where I live down that hardtop four miles.” He turned and looked toward the highway. “Which is east. We’ll find you something to do at the hotel. Have you been alone before?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“I’d imagined not,” he said. “I assume you’ve worked though.”

“No, sir,” I said. I didn’t know what Arthur Remlinger knew about me, but I believed he must’ve known most everything—though possibly not that I liked to play chess and was interested in bees, or had never worked because my mother didn’t want me to for her own reasons.

“Do you feel strange here?” He looked as if something had just occurred to him. His brows furrowed. I’d never met anyone like him. Mildred had said he was thirty-eight, but his face was a young man’s handsome face. At the same time he seemed older, given how he was dressed. He wasn’t consistent, the way I was used to people being.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He turned his straw hat around inch by inch with his long fingers, on one of which was a gold ring. “Well,” he said, “some things are regrettable that happen to us, Dell. We can’t do anything about them.” He looked over my shoulder again at the stucco house. “When I got here . . .” He stopped as he looked at the house, then began again. “I lived in your little house there. I’d stand out in the grass and stare at the sky and fantasize I saw brightly colored birds and I was in Africa and the clouds were mountains.” His blue shirt, which looked to me like a nice shirt, was sweated through in places on the front. He kept his pretty beige jacket over his arm.

“He’s American, like you are! So he’s strange,” Charley suddenly said and laughed. He was referring to Arthur Remlinger. He’d been watching the brown birds flit around his pinwheel garden, but also listening without seeming to. He started walking away toward the trailer, which had a wood crate under its door for a step, his rubber boots kicking the weeds, sending grasshoppers and the small birds arcing up. “You two are birds of a feather,” he said.

“What do you enjoy doing, Dell?” Arthur Remlinger’s blue eyes had almost no color. He cocked his head and put one hand awkwardly in his trouser pockets as if we were going to have a conversation now. He seemed to want to speak to me, but not to know what to say. Mildred had said he was unusual, which he certainly was.

“I like to read,” I said.

He pursed his lips and blinked at me. This seemed to interest him. “Are you planning to attend a good college then when you’re older?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He was wearing soft suede boots one of his pants legs was tucked into. They looked like expensive boots to me. He was dressed in an expensive way, which made him even more out of place being here. He rubbed one boot toe on the dusty ground, then turned and looked back at the car. The woman inside was watching us. She waved but I didn’t wave back. “You and Florence’ll probably get on,” Arthur Remlinger said. “She’s a painter. She’s a devotee of the American Nighthawk school. She’s very artistic.” He nodded. This seemed to amuse him. “I have one of her paintings on the wall in my rooms. I’ll show it to you when I see you again.” He cast his gaze all around where we were—the hot weeds, the Quonset, the broken-down house trailer, the remnants of the town nobody lived in. “They’d definitely burn what’s left of this place down where I’m from,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

This seemed to almost make him laugh, because the dent suddenly appeared in his smooth chin. But he didn’t. “Oh, it would horrify them,” he said. Then he smiled. “No more possibilities for success. Americans all fear that. They have an improper fit with history down below.”

“How long do I have to stay here?” I said. This was the most important thing I wanted to find out, so I should say it. No one had taken up the subject of my going back to Great Falls. Arthur Remlinger hadn’t mentioned my parents—as if he didn’t know about them, or they weren’t important.

“Well,” he said, “stay as long as you want to.” He situated his straw hat up onto his head. He was ready to go. The hat had a leather cord strung from the brim that he pulled under his chin. It made him look entirely different—slightly silly. “You might like it here. You could learn something.”

“I probably won’t like it,” I said, which seemed rude and not grateful, but true.

“Then I guess you’ll find a way to leave,” he said. “It’ll give you some purpose.” He turned and began walking away back toward the Buick. “Dell, I’m awfully glad you’re here. I’ll be seeing you soon.” He said this without turning. “Charley’ll tell you about your work.”

“All right,” I said. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, so I said it again. “All right.”

That was all there was to meeting Arthur Remlinger. As I said, life-changing events can seem not what they are.

Chapter 44

I
N OUR MOTHER’S “CHRONICLE OF A CRIME COMMITTED
by a Weak Person,” she wrote as if Berner and I were present and could read her thoughts the instant she wrote them, and were her confidants who would benefit from what she was thinking. Her chronicle represents to me her truest voice, the one we children never heard, but the voice in which she would’ve expressed herself if she ever fully could’ve—without the limits she’d imposed on life. The same must be true with all parents and their children. You only know a part of each other. Our mother didn’t live a long time in the North Dakota prison. And anyone can tell—true sounding or not—that she was beginning to break apart when she wrote this.

Darlings,

You two have crossed over a national boundary now, which is not like going down the street, you know. It’s a new start, though of course there’s no such thing as a whole new start. [She and Mildred had obviously discussed this.] It’s just the old start put under a new lamp. I know all about that. But you’ll have a chance together in Canada and won’t be blemished more by your father and me. No one will care where you came from or what we did. You won’t stand out. I’ve never been there, but it seems so much like the U.S. Which is good.

I can remember Niagara Falls—looking across them when I was a girl, with my parents. You’ve seen that photograph. Whatever it is that separates people, the falls insisted on it (to me they did, anyway). We don’t discriminate carefully enough, you know, between things that seem alike but are different. You should always do that. Oh, well. You’re going to have thousands of mornings to think about all this. No one will tell you how to feel. You already imagine the world as its opposite, Dell. You told me so. That’s your strength. And, Berner, you have a taste for the unique, so you’ll do fine. My father crossed many borders after Poland, before he got to Tacoma, Washington. He always drew authority from the present. Most definitely.

I’ve discovered a brand-new coldness in me now. It’s not bad to find a cold place in your heart. Artists do this. Maybe it has other names. . . . Strength? Intelligence? I rejected it before—for your father’s sake. Or attempted to. I’m just trying to be helpful to you from here, but am at a disadvantage. I’m sure you understand. . . .

I’ve read this “letter” many times. Each time I’ve realized that she never expected to see either Berner or me again. She knew very well this was the end of the family for all of us. It’s more than sad.

Chapter 45

L
ONELINESS, I’VE READ, IS LIKE BEING IN A LONG
line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

The days that followed my first meeting with Arthur Remlinger—August 31, 1960—must not, then, have been lonely days. Were it not that they ended in calamity, they might’ve been seen as full and rich for a boy in my situation—abandoned, everything familiar gone away, no prospects other than the ones I found in front of me.

My work duties at the beginning—before the Sports arrived and the goose shooting began—were all conducted in Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in the Leonard Hotel, the hotel Arthur Remlinger owned. He himself lived in an apartment on the top third floor, with windows that faced the prairie and from which you could see (what I imagined were) hundreds of miles north and west. I was expected to walk to my work each day, or to pedal one of Charley’s falling-apart J. C. Higgins two-wheelers down the highway, where big grain trucks had strewn a golden carpet of wheat chaff along the roadside, beyond which the Canadian Pacific tracks ran parallel, serving the elevators from Leader to Swift Current. On occasional days, Charley would take me in his truck—often with the Swedish woman, Mrs. Gedins, the other Partreau resident, silent and staring out the window—and deliver me to the Leonard, where my work was swamping bedrooms and bathrooms, which paid me three Canadian dollars a day, plus my meals. Mrs. Gedins worked in the kitchen, preparing the food for the hotel dining room. I had half my afternoons to myself and could either pedal the highway back to Partreau, where there was nothing to do, or else stay and be fed early supper with the harvesters and railroaders in the poorly lit dining room and get back after dusk. I was specifically forbidden by Charley to hitchhike the highway. Canadians, he said, didn’t believe in hitchhiking and would assume I was a criminal or else an Indian and would possibly try to run over me. And hitchhiking would make me stand out and attract suspicion and draw the notice of the Mounties, which no one wanted. It was as if Charley himself had something hidden that couldn’t stand a close inspection.

Although I’d never done swamping work, except to help clean our house when our mother required it, I found I could do it. Charley showed me tricks for getting into and out of rooms quickly so I could finish the ones I was assigned—sixteen, plus the two shared bathrooms for each floor used by the roomers, who were oil-rig roughnecks and railroad-gang boys and drummers and custom harvesters from the Maritimes who moved across the prairies each fall. Many of these roomers were young, little older than I was. Many were lonely and homesick, and some were violent and liked to drink and fight. But none ever paid attention to how they’d left a room they’d slept in, or a bathroom where they cleaned themselves and used the toilet. Their tiny bedrooms smelled putrid with their odors—their sweat and filth, and their food and whiskey and the gumbo mud and bottled liniment and tobacco. Down the halls the bathrooms were rank and humid and soapy, and stained from private uses the men also never bothered to clean—as they would’ve in their mothers’ homes. Sometimes I would push open a bedroom door with my bucket and mop and broom and rags and astringents, and there would be one of the boys alone in a room with several beds in it, smoking or staring out the window or reading a bible or a magazine. Or there would be one of the Filipino girls sitting on the bedside alone, and once or twice with no clothes on, and more than once in the bed with one of the roughnecks or some salesman, or with another girl sleeping into the long morning. Each time I said nothing and carefully closed the door and skipped the room that day. The Filipino girls, of course, were not Filipinos, Charley explained to me. They were Blackfoot or Gros Ventre girls Arthur Remlinger had had driven in by taxi from Swift Current or over from Medicine Hat, and who worked in the bar at night and enlivened the atmosphere and made the Leonard more attractive to the customers, since women were not otherwise allowed. Often when I arrived in the morning for work, I would see the Swift Current taxi parked in the alley beside the hotel, its driver sleeping in the front seat or reading a book, waiting for the girls to come out the side door, for the ride home. Charley told me one of the Filipinos was actually a Hutterite girl with a baby and no husband. But I never saw such a girl in the Leonard and doubted Hutterite girls would stoop to that, or that their parents would permit it.

And I don’t mean by this to say that I instantly, perfectly fitted myself into the life in Fort Royal. It was far from that. I knew that my parents were in jail, and that my sister had run away, and I was in all likelihood abandoned among strangers. But it was easier—easier than you would think—to turn my attention away from all that and to live in the present, as Mildred had said, as if each day were its own small existence.

The little town of Fort Royal was a lively place in the early autumn and benefited considerably by comparison to Partreau, where I was made to live, four miles away—a strange, vacant, ghostly residence except for Charley in his trailer and Mrs. Gedins, who rarely acknowledged me. Fort Royal was a small, bustling prairie community on the railroad line and the 32 highway between Leader and Swift Current. It must’ve been little different from the town where my father robbed the bank in North Dakota.