Kanata (35 page)

“Just knock the horns off and wipe its ass, honey,” Marion said sweetly.

“I'm going back to Los Angeles,” Michael said.

“Scarth said he'd keep you on until the end of the shoot.”

“He can use one of the Italians.”

Marion stared past him. She would be here for more than a week, bored, angry, and alienated. “Maybe I should use one as well.”

B
ack in Los Angeles, Marion saw her opportunities narrowing. The extraordinary success of
The Big Parade
hadn't translated into anything for her. She had imagined a rise through the ranks to a position of influence, if not power, but now she was stalled, working as a minion. She deserved more, and was surrounded by people who deserved less. She knew her frustration was poisonous, that it had infected her life with Michael, which had stalled as well. She felt as if she was encased in amber, like a prehistoric insect. At work one day she had had a sobbing fit that went on for half an hour, a gulping heaving jag that she couldn't control and which frightened her.

Marion used to trace her finger along the scar on Michael's face, mapping his history, she said. But she had no real interest in history, even in what had happened the day before. She was one of those people who moved to California to obliterate the past, a habit she kept up with great skill and determination. Each moment disappeared, along with its consequences and guilt, replaced by the false hope of the present.

When Harry Shearling, a producer with Rayart Pictures, started courting her, Marion didn't mention Michael. Shearling had thinning sandy hair and wore tightly tailored double-breasted suits that presented a masculine silhouette. Rayart Pictures was a Poverty Row studio, a far cry from
mighty MGM. It had taken over the old Selig Studio offices in Echo Park, a glum operation, but Harry understood the business. He could list the grosses of every major film released that year, and he studied Thalberg as if he were the Talmud. Harry was close to forty, too old to be a boy wonder, but he was determined. He talked about the national appetite for entertainment and how there was something inside everyone, whether they were William Randolph Hearst or Nanook of the North, that wanted stories. Movies, he told Marion, reaching for her hand in a calculated way, were a map of the American soul. Marion listened, her natural cynicism held slightly at bay. She knew Harry would never run MGM, but there was money to be made even at the fringes if you played the angles, and Harry looked like he could manage that. So as their lunches went on, his hand clutching hers lightly, he became more attractive, the light shining off his beatific scalp. They had sex in his office, which occupied a dusty corner of the building and looked onto a parking lot. She felt his flesh beneath his shirt and undershirt, which he kept on, small handfuls of unkneaded dough wherever she clutched. He stared to the side and laboured briefly, then showered her with grateful kisses and offered her a job as associate producer.

D
riving out to Rayart Studios to meet Marion, Michael wondered what to expect. She was working on a dismal western that was being cranked out in a few weeks. They had been circling some kind of reconciliation. It was after nine when Michael got there, and the soundstage was empty. Crudely painted scenes of dramatic rock formations and garish sunsets filled one wall. The whole thing was being
shot in the studio. Marion appeared at the far end of the cavernous space and walked across the concrete floor, the sound of her shoes echoing off the walls.

“Marion.”

She was ten feet away when she pulled out the gun and fired it six times into Michael's chest. Her face was expressionless. She dropped the prop pistol and left the studio. Michael felt the percussion of the blanks and stood rooted, too stunned to move. The adrenalin coursed through his body in lightning bursts. A mural of a dying desert town stood in front of him, oversized and unconvincing, and he stared at it for fifteen minutes before walking out to his car.

WILDERNESS

1935

Marion and I were never divorced, but I never saw her again after she shot me. I left Los Angeles a month later, suddenly a foreigner. The sun bleached the city and it looked like a photograph that hadn't been developed properly. When Marion and I started out, we were full of hope. What couple isn't? You set out on this journey together, unmapped, an adventure. It was perfect for a while. And then we lost our way. An old story.

Billy Whitecloud lay mute, unshaven, a dusting of dark hairs on his upper lip. What will come of these sessions? Michael wondered. Will Billy rise up one day and blink his eyes and thank him for not giving up, like in some weepy movie? Or was this a kind of therapy for Michael, an audience that wouldn't give up his secrets, though there hadn't been many.

The Jazz Age was ending; all that postwar optimism had to go somewhere. Josephine Baker grinning as her breasts wobbled in black and white. But few people actually lived in the Jazz Age. They went to work and saved and had kids and got their Buicks
stuck in the mud. They argued about baseball and went to church and had picnics and drank lemonade. And then the Depression hit.

You could see it on people's faces. In their homes you knew there was saved string and candle wax and pennies and coupons and a suspicion of good fortune. My mother had already seen starvation and had adopted the usual defences: She raised a few cattle, grew a garden, canned the excess, wasted nothing.

The Depression tested the faith of a lot of people, though it probably strengthened the faith of just as many. For one thing, the world looked like the Old Testament, at least around here. Dunstan O'Connell's ranch was blown out and dead, a foot of sand piled against the barn. It was eight miles south of here. The provincial inspector came by one day and tested his cattle, what remained of them, and found two of them were diseased. I remember getting up early and riding out to the coulee and we herded them into that natural pen, driving them down the incline. A dozen men, neighbouring ranchers who had the sense not to say anything, stood at the top of the small ridge, loading their rifles. The cattle were skittish and a few fell. O'Connell gave the sign and fired the first shot, and a dozen shots immediately followed. Dust rose as they stampeded in useless circles and dropped in heaps. They bellowed and panicked and we kept firing until every steer was down, and then searched for movement among the brown and white carpet and aimed for heads. I remember O'Connell staring down at the carnage. He was sixty-six and it would take three years of hard work and perfect weather to reclaim the land. He was finished and he stared at that lifeless mess and knew it. We carefully spread lime over that mess and rode back.

Dunstan bought my mother a radio in the thirties and she used to listen to
Amos 'n' Andy
, a show that came up from the United States about two negroes who were always getting into some kind
of jam. It was her favourite show. She never laughed; she said she just liked the sound of their voices.

There was a family that lived a few miles south of us—the Clancys—a hard-luck clan. They came to town in 1906 on their way to Banff. Cochrane was quarantined then because of smallpox, and when they got off the train to get some air and stretch their legs the conductor wouldn't let them back on. Maybe contaminated, he said, wasn't going to take the chance. Clancy threw a fit but it didn't do him any good. Their bags were taken off and the family was stuck in a town of three hundred people. They never left.

Mary Clancy had an army surplus phone set attached to the fence near her house. It was hooked up to the barbed wire that went all the way to our place. We had a phone set too and my mother and Mary talked to each other along the barbed wire. The government had quit paying for phone lines because they blew down and were too expensive to repair and there weren't enough people out here to make it worth their while. You had to yell sometimes to be heard. It was mostly Mary yelling into the phone and my mother on the other end listening to her tales of Irish grief. They were a curious pair.

Mary's husband died of pneumonia in the winter of '32. They loaded him onto the wagon to take him into town but he was dead before they got there. It was thirty-five below. There were seven kids in that house. It was built on a hill and it took the west wind full force and in the winter it just blew right through the place. They put newspapers up on the walls as insulation. They'd gather papers from town and make their own paste and glue them to the walls, one on top of the other. They had a neighbour, a widower named Levant, a man in his sixties, living alone. One day he was at the Clancys', staring at those newspapers. There's a photograph of a cow standing on a railway track and he wanted to know what happens to that cow. He can't read, he's illiterate, not that unusual
for the time. So he asks the eldest daughter to read the story to him. She starts reading, “A heifer belonging to Lucas Porter of Cremona wandered down the spur line last Tuesday” etc. This girl was maybe eighteen, she wasn't pretty but she had a beautiful voice, the kind of voice where you don't want the story to end. She reads him the whole story. Not much of a story but he's hanging on every word. He asks for another one, then another. He starts coming by twice a week and sits in the rocking chair as she reads the newspapers on the wall. They keep getting new ones to paste over the old ones. They might be three inches thick. He pays her a dollar each time. Men working as navvies made that in a twelve-hour day. It wasn't the news that kept him coming back; some of the papers were six months old. It was her voice. She'd read him a story about a man who had his thumb cut off at the Quigley sawmill, or a lost pig, or a calf that fell through the spring ice, floating downriver, its brown eyes staring up as though through a window. She read comics and cattle prices and wheat futures, and he lived for the sound of that voice.

During the Depression everyone talked politics. They beat the subject until it was bloody and useless, then brought it up again the next day. I guess we were hoping someone would come along with an answer, but no one ever did.

Mackenzie King was prime minister for twenty-two years and yet Willie (as he was known) was almost invisible. His reign was like a magic act where no one ever figured out where the lady vanished to. There were moments when I thought King had vanished as well; the magician's final trick. He was as placid as a bowl of porridge. Had we known his actual thoughts, we would have run for the hills, but that's probably true of most people. So we had a leader who didn't lead and we convinced ourselves that this was progress.

1

M
ACKENZIE
K
ING,
1935

Physically, William Lyon Mackenzie King was ordinary, scrupulously, almost aggressively so, inclined to stoutness (who would have guessed at the athleticism of his youth?), his hair sparse and flattened onto a spherical head. He was staring at Mrs. Etta Wriedt of Detroit, a serious and slightly pinched woman whose prosaic face stared upward, studiously vacant, though her words came out in quick conversational rhythms. She was speaking the words of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister, dead for sixteen years. She reminded King of Laurier when the light was fading in him, his feminine beauty betraying him near the end. Laurier had been a great leader, possessed of an enviable charisma, a quality no one accused King of having.