Kanata (53 page)

3

Nancy Baxter sat with her parents in the RCMP office and explored the fine line she had drawn. She looked down at the dull linoleum floor.

“Was there anything special about your relationship with Billy Whitecloud?” Constable Edson asked her. He was a twenty-six-year-old recruit with a shaving rash that shimmered slightly under its veneer of oil.

In class Nancy had developed a fixed mournful look, like a beautiful widow, she thought. As the only real witness to the event, she realized that she was the owner of a commodity. She wasn't the first to fall in love with tragedy. Its comforting darkness, its scale and celebrity, the way it rose above homework assignments, silent breakfasts, annoying brothers, tentative hair styles, and the mundane crawl of the seasons; its rich public transcendence. Tragedy seduced.

It wasn't a conscious leap from loving drama to loving Billy Whitecloud. She didn't love him when he was conscious, of course, when he was slouching and lurking silently at school, never once volunteering an answer in class. She hadn't even noticed him then, would have been unable to remember his name. But now he was a tangible event, and her proximity made her suddenly tangible. Billy was an opportunity.

She pondered her course of action. What was it she loved now? Maybe his tragic maturity, laid out on the metal hospital bed like a war victim. His silence, which was moving, was a kind of wisdom, and each day it grew deeper compared to the words spoken around her. His wisdom ennobled her somehow; there was this bond, this pact that only they understood. And maybe that is what love is, carrying around this knowledge that you have a fortress to retreat to and in that fortress is a love so perfect that neither of you has to say a word.

She had implied that Billy Whitecloud's coma was a source of personal anguish. It hadn't taken much. The girls hovered around her, waiting for new information, which in turn empowered them. Nancy controlled the story; she
was
the story, and she shaped it in a way to emphasize that, ensuring it was passed on, tendrils that reached through the school and down Main Street to Cremona and High River and Springbank and maybe even Calgary. And each telling added flesh and detail: Nancy Baxter had secretly been dating Billy Whitecloud, which explains so much now that you think about it. The way he always lingered at the edge of things, stayed aloof, the way he looked at her, the way she looked at him. This story snaked through the foothills, a living thing that heralded Nancy's tragic loss. It didn't
matter that she hadn't dated him, that she wouldn't have dated him if you'd put a gun to her head. Now he was the perfect date. No fumbling with her brassiere as August Purvue had, twiddling her nipples like he was trying to find a radio station. No holding clammy hands all the way through the movie so you ended up not enjoying the movie, no wet tongue in her ear searching for an opening. He was in a coma; her immaculate lover.

Her parents stared, waiting for her response.

“Billy was a friend,” she said carefully, looking up at Edson.

“Nothing more.”

“We … were friends.”

“Did you actually see him go out the window?”

“It was more I heard it. I was sitting against the door in the back. The music was loud. I just wanted to go home. That's all I was thinking. Going home.”

“And you heard Billy go out the window?”

“He was already half out. He was singing, sort of yelling.”

Nancy remembered being both afraid of this dangerous game and annoyed that the open window was whipping her hair in a kaleidoscopic swirl. Her constant attempts to order her hair, her hands moving rapidly, like a raccoon washing itself at a stream, were useless, lustre and body both being killed.

What she had been, more than anything else, was bored. She basked in the attention of these boys, but none of them actually talked to her. Billy didn't say anything, and Augie and Hector just talked loudly with each other, trying to impress her. She had measured this particular boredom against the boredom that waited at home: checking the jeans in her closet for fadedness, holding up her mother's earrings
to her ears in the mirror to see what pierced ears would bring. Her father in the living room drinking a Molson Canadian and watching
Hockey Night in Canada
, Johnny Bower's quilted face stopping another puck for the Maple Leafs.

The convex shape of the gravel section road, graded to drain rainwater into the ditch, coupled with August Purvue's driving and the heavy Mercury Marquis—like being in a boat—combined to create a drunken rhythm, and she remembered thinking she might throw up. The radio was turned up loud, and a Van Morrison song that Purvue liked was playing. He tapped one hand on the steering wheel.

It scared her, having Billy hanging out of the car like that and Augie driving so fast. She huddled against the far door. “Pull him
in
!” she yelled. Had she actually said the words? “What is the
matter ...
”

Then Billy's legs scissored against the roof and she screamed. Purvue locked up the brakes and the car skidded to a stop and she threw up.

T
he sunlight came in the west window and captured the suspended dust in Edson's office, tiny grey particulate that swirled in abrupt clouds. The impression she wanted to give Constable Edson was that she had always loved Billy Whitecloud and he had always loved her. She liked this version; it showed her in a flattering tragic light, as someone who had been living a larger, more interesting life than anyone imagined. A woman with secrets. Each day would bring its weight of sorrow, and each day she would rise to greet it in another well-chosen outfit. She would tell her girlfriends that his strength was within her, that he was her warrior.

This was the random thought that came to her when she reluctantly went to the hospital and stared down at his placid, unfamiliar face. She took the royal blue felt pen out of her purse and drew the war paint on, carefully drawing the lines at a diagonal, not pressing too hard on that innocent skin. She found a yellow marker, Sunrise Yellow, and drew a line between the two blue ones, and then stared at her work happily. The primary colours had a force, an energy. They conjured something private and tribal. She put the pens back in her purse and stared at Billy. My warrior, she whispered experimentally.

B
illy's unheard version was a roar of wind, his body half out the window, his hip uncomfortably on the door where the window had been lowered. He had never been included in their listless small-town Saturday nights. He lingered at the edge of groups at school and didn't know what form his social being should take. He was sitting on the curb of the parking lot of the Esso station, without any plan, just there to avoid his own house. His father was back from the northern oil rigs for five days and everyone in their house was nervous. It was Saturday night, and his father had had a few drinks. Those huge hands, scarred, scabbed at the knuckles, swinging carelessly, like the knot at the end of a heavy rope. A lazy movement but the hand moved with surprising speed, fast enough that Billy's expression hadn't changed, a combination of fear and inquisitiveness (Why did you have to hit her?), and it was still there on his face when the hand arrived.

So he was sitting in the convenience store parking lot staring at the hubcaps of slow-passing trucks when he heard
Hector Grayson's voice. “Whitecloud, what're you doin', man!” Hector was yelling out of the Mercury Marquis driven by August Purvue. They were getting more Coke. Billy was invited along, swept up in the brotherhood that came from rye and Coke and the calming voice of Donovan on the car radio.

The Coke teased his throat with its caustic bubbles and the rye tasted of medicine. They drove out to the Ghost Lake reservoir and sat for an hour, then roared back in the Marquis. Purvue and Hector tried to impress Nancy by arguing about Muhammad Ali. Billy's own fear of her was so great that he hadn't said a word, not even hello.

They drove fast along the section roads against a half moon that sat near the mountains and Billy put his head out the window and let the wind hit him, suddenly removed from Nancy's petulance, and from the drunken brotherhood of August and Hector. He didn't have anything to add to their stories. The night air was liberating. He inched out farther, one hand hooked onto the plastic grip affixed to the ceiling, the other resting on the door. He could smell the sage growing in the ditches. In his head the rye and Coke formed effervescent half-dreams. He floated with the maritime movements of the big car, the air filled with a dozen scents, the coming of autumn, the taste of frost. The freedom that came with movement, a primitive, satisfying surge. The redtailed hawk travels at a hundred miles an hour, almost motionless in its descent. A missile.
Buteo jamaicensis
coming to earth to claim its prize.

4

The November light hung over the hills, pale and empty. The wind was from the west, and you could taste the bitterness that preceded the first snow. Michael drove with the window open, letting in the cold air. He had visited his mother a few days ago and was alarmed at how pale she had become. He made her some tea and listened to the ghost report. She had seen a herd of riderless horses. His mother was ghostly herself now, almost transparent. One day he would arrive to find the trace of her shadow on the land, all that was left, like those victims at Hiroshima.

Michael had heard that Davis Whitecloud was on the lam. He had beaten a man to death in the parking lot of a Grande Prairie bar. The police were looking for him but he had disappeared into the working maw of the north, maybe doodlebugging on a seismic line near the Arctic, or
roughnecking on a gas rig out of Medicine Hat, or he'd fled to Montana. One way or the other, he wouldn't be seeing Billy again.

Michael drove past the plant that made railway ties, the smell of creosote an assault that lingered until he reached the empty rodeo grounds. The main street was quiet. It was Saturday. Michael pulled into the school parking lot. The front door was open and Ed Usak, the janitor, was moving behind an electric floor buffer that hauled him in its wake. The mural was finished and mounted on the gymnasium wall. He had seen the panels that they had worked on individually, the wars, esoteric maps, the clumsy portrait of John Diefenbaker done in thick oils. What would it look like in its entirety, this folk art?

The light in the gym was flat, the fluorescent lights off, a pale illumination coming from three windows high on the wall covered with wire mesh. And there it was, the result of more than a year's work, the project begun with last year's students, who laboured until June, their work taken up by this new class. Its ten separate five-foot panels stretched across the pale yellow cinder-block wall. There was Cartier arriving, his ships small dots in waves drawn like slanted letter
M
s in slanting upper case. Samuel de Champlain killing two Iroquois chiefs with his oversized harquebus. A scene from the Plains of Abraham, particularly bloody in its sweep. John A. Macdonald was at the centre, his face traced from a photograph that had been projected onto paper. His nose was a foot high, an alcoholic beacon painted a sickly mauve.

He had expected maps of the town and the country, clumsy and idiosyncratic, and there were a few of those. There was a map of the world, missing continents and
oceans, dragons drawn at the edges without irony, and one of that evening showing the car and the road, and local points: Ghost dam, the rodeo grounds, lines that showed the trajectory of Billy Whitecloud flying out of the car toward a heaven rendered in fluffy clouds.

Nancy Baxter had a map of her heart drawn in a simple valentine shape. It was, unwittingly, drawn as a Stabius-Werner projection, a style of map that came from the fifteenth century, the invention of a parish priest in Nuremberg. Inside her heart was a neat cursive script that followed the cordiform contours. In different colours, indicating a hierarchy, there were names: the contents of her small-town heart. At the centre, in red ink, was
BILLY
.