Kanata (22 page)

“Got myself a sinner,” roared Guy Weadick, and the crowd roared back. “What is it the Bible says? ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,' well …” He laughed.

Wedgewood smiled weakly.

Crouched in the half-light, Michael was transfixed by the spectacle. “What's he going to do with that preacher?” he whispered to Stanford.

“Nothing good, I imagine.”

Michael held his breath in anticipation and then let it out slowly and deliberately.

Weadick waved his white hat and kept hold of Percy, whose face was bubbling with perspiration, his hands pinned to his sides, a baby's hands.

“A man who walks with God fears nothing, isn't that right, Reverend? But there is one thing he
should
fear. One thing that every manjack with a lick of sense, whether he is a man of God or the devil's spawn, should tremble at.” Weadick paused to assess his audience, men in straw hats and women fanning themselves in the heat.
“And that is a woman!”
The crowd roared and Percy blushed, and on that cue a woman rode into the infield on a golden palomino. She had a white hat too. Dark-haired, with a crooked smile, the prettiest woman Michael had ever seen.

“This is my wife, Mrs. Flores LaDue, currently ranked the world's most accomplished horsewoman,” Weadick bellowed to great applause. “She will commence to astound you with her skills.”

At the north end of the field targets had been set up, rusted heart-shaped metal plates mounted on stakes. Flores pranced her horse and took off her hat and waved it to the crowd. She disappeared from Michael and Stanford's view and they raced around the beams and ducked under the crossbars trying to relocate her.

“I suggest, gentlemen, that now is not the time to get up and stretch your legs,” Weadick announced. “You want to be as still as a mouse around a woman with a loaded gun!” The crowd cheered as Flores produced two pistols, spinning them on her index fingers. Michael watched her, his sightline between a large man and his slender wife who had left space between them, out of habit perhaps. The pistols spun and caught the sun, and Flores gave her horse a dig with her boots and it began to canter. She took one of the pistols and aimed and fired at a metal heart and it fell with a thud. Flores dashed by and Michael and Stanford scrambled until they could see her again, Michael almost panicked at the loss of this extraordinary vision.

The two brothers ran to where the bleachers ended and peeked out, risking discovery to see Flores. But everyone else was mesmerized too. She turned around backwards in the saddle and took off her hat, waving it. With her other hand she drew her pistol, fired, hitting another heart. Then she holstered the gun and spun around in the saddle, tapping her hat on tight and prancing by the grandstand with that crooked smile.

Flores trotted up to Weadick and Percy.

Weadick addressed Percy in his stage voice. “Now you are a man of God, sir, and you will be happy to know that it is God Himself who guides the hand of my lovely wife.” Percy's white shirt was wet through under his black wool suit, as if he'd been baptized in a river.

Michael retreated under the bleachers and found a sightline behind two fat men. Another man entered the ring, carrying a hat, holding it upright with both hands as if he was carrying a cake. Sitting in the hollowed crown of the tall white hat was an overripe melon stained with its own juices. The man placed the heavy hat on Percy's head, who finally found his voice. “This has gone far enough. I demand—”

“Where is your faith, man?” Weadick boomed to the crowd. He had the solid psychological insight of the showman, and could sense that Percy, this small-eyed, plump man, was not popular.

“Is he a true man of faith?” Weadick asked. The crowd roared its response; a dozen sentiments that blurred, some calling out Percy's name, and one yelling “Shoot the bastard!”

Michael recognized Percy from his one visit to church with his mother. It was a small Methodist congregation that met in a white church in the foothills. Most of it had been confusing, Percy describing the terrible things that awaited those who strayed, but Michael had enjoyed the sermon. There wasn't a shortage of action in the Old Testament. Afterwards, while they rode back, Michael asked questions about God and his mother answered as best she could and then they rode in silence. And now here was Percy, looking damp and sacrificial.

Flores dismounted and gave her horse a pat on the rump and it trotted obediently back to the north end of the infield
and through the exit. She walked over and planted a kiss on Percy's soft mouth and again the crowd roared.

“Reverend,” Weadick yelled, “if God has decided to call you home, at least you can't say you never been kissed.” Percy was at the threshold that divides liquid from solid, melting in the August sun. He imagined himself a wet essence given up to the Lord. Water pooled in his shoes and flowed down his chest like spring runoff. I will be water, he silently chanted, and when Delilah in the red boots squeezes the trigger, the bullet will pass harmlessly through me; He will not forsake me.

Flores marched off an exaggerated ten steps and winked when she turned around. Michael felt that the wink was for him, that she could see him with her sharpshooter eyes, see between the fat men whose dark suit jackets had been removed and were now damp heaps on their laps. She could pull out that gun and fire a bullet through the straw hat of the man in the first row, between the two fat men and between the faces of Michael and Stanford, faces that were only a bullet width apart. They would feel its heat but be untouched, a kiss almost, delivered to the ten-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old brother, a complicit kiss that implied confederacy and love.

She drew her gun and spun it around her finger and then lifted it slowly, as if it was being pulled by an invisible mechanical device, or guided by the hand of God. It stopped, steady as an April rain, levelled at Percy. The power of speech deserted him and his God, and he was once again the plump boy who was bullied in the one-room schoolhouse that held every age, the big, mule-brained farm boys tormenting him, and now he worked hard each Sunday instilling fear into them, using the Old Testament as a club, threatening famine and locusts.

The sound of the bullet hitting the ripe melon, the explosion producing a shower of juice, brought a collective exhalation from the crowd, then a roar. “You missed!” one of the fat men yelled, laughing and stamping his heavy boots, his musty wool pants shaking in front of Michael.

When the dramatically moustached face of the Royal North-West Mounted Policeman appeared suddenly through two slats of the bleacher seats, he and Stanford bounced under and over the beams like ferrets, launching themselves out into the sun and racing for the woods. They sprinted down a path and slid into some brush in an aspen grove, breathing hard and smiling crazily.

O
ver the next four years, Flores LaDue appeared to Michael, beckoning in half-dreams, riding toward him with her crooked smile, a smoking gun in one hand. She touched his hair, kissed him, and whispered
My sweet angel
. And now here she was again, her image blurred on the handbill, standing beside Weadick, and the news they were going to present the Greatest Show on Earth. It would be in Calgary, and Michael wanted to be part of it. He was fourteen now, Flores still his only love.

Stanford brought the handbill up to their bedroom. It was folded into a tiny square and tucked into his sock, contraband, and he carefully unfolded it on the bed. Near the bottom, it read, “Calling All Indians!” Flores and Weadick wanted an Indian parade.

“You think that means us?” Michael asked.

“I figure it does. We tell them we're eighteen if they ask.”

“Who's going to ask?”

“I don't know. Anyone. If anyone asks.”

“I don't look eighteen.”

“Go to sleep.”

Michael had been having the same dream for a week, submerged in the creek, which was infinitely deep, looking up through the clear water at the world shimmering there without him.

“Do you have dreams, Stanford?”

“I suppose everyone does.”

“You're in them?”

“Sometimes.”

“What happens in them?”

Stanford was quiet for a minute. “There are dreams I can't remember,” he said, “and when I wake up I feel like something important isn't being told to me.”

“What do you think they're trying to tell us? The dreams.” Was he was going to drown?

“The spirits guide us in our dreams. It's the only time they can talk to us. Go to sleep.”

“Am I going to drown?”

“No one is going to drown.”

“Do you remember him, Stanford?”

“Who?” Though he knew who Michael was talking about.

“Dad.”

“I remember him walking around outside with the dogs.”

“Why do you suppose he did it?”

“I guess he got tired of something.”

“You think it was us.”

“He didn't spend enough time with us to get tired. I think he was just worn out.”

Michael wondered how anyone could get that worn out. He was glad it hadn't been him who found their father.

S
tanford and Michael sat in the brush thirty yards from the Cochrane train station, waiting for the men to load up milk, cream, and beef to haul into Calgary. Stanford pointed to a boxcar with an open door. “That one there,” he whispered. “Follow me when I go.”

When the train shunted forward, they broke from their cover and sprinted across the open ground. Stanford ran to the open door and got hold of the steel handle and swung himself up, a sudden fear, his head filling with stories of legs cut off as men swung under the wheels, stewbums that missed their jump and were cut in half, men with stumps named Shorty. He got his body horizontal and his legs fought for purchase and found the floor. He rolled inside and then scrambled back to the door.

Michael was running alongside. There was a gully coming up in less than a hundred yards. The train would be moving too fast by then anyway. Michael's face was a frozen mask of fear, adventure, and trust in his older brother, some powerful algorithm of adolescence. Stanford leaned out and pointed to the handle. “Grab here, then throw yourself up.” Stanford had a new fear: his brother cut in half, his death Stanford's fault, their mother silent for two years. Michael missed the handle but Stanford grabbed him and pulled him roughly and as Michael's legs swung up Stanford half expected to see bloody, footless ankles. Michael sat up, whole and thrilled. They sprawled on the scarred wood and watched the Bow Valley go by through the open door, the erratic stands of pine, the deepening of the valley, parched hills the colour of wheat.

“Have you done this before?” Michael asked his brother.

“A few times.”

“Where'd you go?”

“Along the tracks.”

“How are we going to get off ?”

“The train slows coming into Calgary.”

“Will we go to jail if we're caught, Stanford?”

“We're not going to jail.”

“What if Mother finds out?”

“She won't find out if you don't tell her.”

“I won't tell her but she'll find out.”

Michael believed his mother had a connection to the spiritual world that gave her constant updates on the benign treacheries of her children. He felt calm in her presence, the same calm he had felt as a child sitting in front of the wood stove in their kitchen, his mother in the rocking chair peeling an apple. He played with small lead soldiers, a present from their father. He had meticulously painted wounds on some of them with tiny drops of his own blood applied with a splinter. The wood stove had a distinctive smell, and Michael could sit there for hours. As a child he had been quiet to the point where it worried his mother, despite her own gift for it. She took him to a country doctor, a heavy-set man with a thick moustache and blue watery eyes. He sat across from Michael in his collarless shirt and black suspenders, staring at him, and then asked him questions: What day is it? What is your best friend's name? Have you ever been to the moon? And so on. His brother was his best friend, everyone knew that. Most of the questions were obvious or absurd. He stared back at the doctor in silence. A moon child, the doctor finally said authoritatively. They live in their heads. They make good caretakers. His mother led him out of the doctor's office, past a girl whose hand was wrapped in red-stained gauze, her face empty of blood. Her mother sat beside her, holding a doll.

The train slowed through the city, staring onto backyards, clothes hanging, a jumble of smokehouses and weeds and outhouses and vacant lots, the town's hind end. A few black cars moved hesitantly along Ninth Avenue. The city lurched, a tangle of machinery and traffic.

“I don't know that I could live here,” Michael said.

“No one is asking you to.”

“Could you live here?”

“I could live anywhere if I had to, I suppose.”

“Why do people come to the city, Stanford?”

“So they can disappear.”

“Do you ever want to disappear?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do?”

“There's different ways of disappearing.”

Stanford had a scar on his chin that he said he got breaking horses at Dunstan O'Connell's ranch though Michael knew this wasn't true. Stanford's hands were sometimes scabbed. He came in a few mornings looking haunted and rough, getting in just as Michael was waking up.

Stanford grabbed Michael's hand and they jumped together. They rolled, got up, and instinctively ran though no one was chasing them.

At the fairgrounds there were a few hundred Indians listening to John MacDougall, a Methodist missionary who had been paid $390 by the Calgary Stampede Board to deliver two thousand savages for the parade. “There are Indians, and there are
Indians
,” he said, thinking, as he looked over his crowd, that he should have asked for $500, a round number. “Now I'll be honest,” he said, taking off his straw hat and delicately sponging his forehead with a handkerchief. “People don't come to a show to look at
prize-winning wheat, or polled Herefords or Shorthorns or Clydesdales. They come to a show to see a
show
. And that, gentlemen, is what you are. You may not know it, you look around, maybe two hundred men standing here in your everyday clothes. But imagine
two thousand
of you. Imagine two thousand Indians wearing the same skins and paint your ancestors wore. Imagine the sight of all that colourful history parading down Eighth Avenue on horseback. Now that, gentlemen, is a
show
.” MacDougall took off his hat and dabbed his forehead again. There would be dozens of these speeches to give, he realized heavily, out at the Sarcee reservation, the Blood, the Blackfoot, Peigan, the Stoneys.