Knucklehead & Other Stories (11 page)

I jerked my eyes open. My car was back on the right side of the road, swerving for the ditch. I could smell the tire smoke and burning brake linings from the motorhome. I came to rest a hundred metres later, the nose of the Mercedes slanted down, the tail jutting up onto the highway. The farmer from the truck following behind pulled open my door, shook my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I swiveled my head slowly. The world seemed washed with a brilliant yellow light, as if a spotlight brighter than the sun had been turned on. A steady rushing noise whooshed in my ears. The new hay and grasses on the hills radiated, luminescent. A wavering heat mirage billowed from the broken asphalt. The brim of the farmer's cap almost touched my forehead. I stared at his full feminine lips, so out of place in the leathery face, and leaned forward wanting to kiss them. I smelled manure and sweat. The farmer's lips moved. “Are you okay? Turn that damned radio off.” I realized it was the man speaking. I switched off the stereo.

My eyes adjusted to sunshine. I noticed my shades on the floor. The rushing in my ears was the chirping of crickets and the wind beating the prairie grasses.

Now comes another part of the story I lie about—or rather, never mention. A sudden urgent pain surged through my bowels. I struggled to free myself from my safety belt. “Easy does it,” the farmer said, just like his bumper sticker, but I hopped out. I lurched around to the front of my car and dropped my trousers and squatted in the caked mud at the bottom of the ditch. I clutched the bumper and stared where a pair of hand-sized swallowtail butterflies were flattened into the grille. I discovered what it means to have the shit scared out of you. As my body relieved its tension, I chanted to the butterflies, “Better you than me, better you than me.”

As I relaxed, a wave of embarrassment washed over me. A crowd had gathered up the road, pointedly not looking my way. A car towing a trailer crept past; a boy stared out the window, then I saw him turn to his parents in the front seat, talking and pointing. The motorhome driver stood on the shoulder above and watched me. He held the same grim expression, but I thought I detected a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. I asked, “Could you get me the Kleenex from the glove box?”

I clambered up from the ditch. I smoothed the front of my pants, made sure my shirt was tucked in. Picked up my sunglasses and covered my eyes. My hands were trembling. I closed them into fists. I have a trick from my boarding school days that I still use. When I was a boy it helped me when I was really scared—of the school bullies, the headmaster, of Parents' Day visits. I call it the Fearless Raccoon. I close my mouth hard, and concentrate on how the muscles of my jaw feel. I imagine two walnuts in my cheeks, and that I'm a little fearless raccoon. Without being, conscious of it, I realized I was doing it that day. My breathing steadied and I controlled the shakes. The man from the Michigan motorhome and the farmer hitched a towrope from the truck to the Mercedes and hauled the car back onto the highway. When they crimped the rear bumper, I dismissed it with a wave of my hand. I thanked the farmer, nodded to the motorhome man and ignored the gawking crowd. Traffic crawled past from both directions. I climbed in the car, changed the tape to something classical, then sped away.

II

I was on my way to the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre. It was, I had been told by the Travel Alberta trip-planning consultant, the only United Nations-designated World Heritage Resource in Canada. The centre has won awards for its design, and so I took a professional interest.

I am an architect. So I keep telling myself. My small boutique practice specializes in doing a select few sprawling homes for the rich and the very rich. The rich trust me: I am one of them, and a dilettante, and the wealthy trust their own dilettantes. Some years I come close to breaking even on the business. Most of my clients are acquaintances of my father or grandfather or my famous uncle. Others know my mother's father and brothers, and still a few more know my father's second and third wives' families. Many mornings, as I perfect the knot in my silk tie, I try to hold my gaze in the mirror as I remind myself, “I am an architect.”

I rarely design great buildings. It's true that the lions of architecture—Wright and Mies, Philip Johnson, Erickson here in Canada—did find willing patrons, true lovers of art and form, clients who indulged the artist, encouraged design with vision. The results may or may not be livable—bedrooms with columns in the centre of the room, glass houses in suburbs, bunker-like austerity. Livable, no, but living works of art, yes!

My own work is closer to a long progression of compromises through phases of conception, design and building. I respond to the whims of those who sign the cheques. If my client wants a Doric portico grafted onto a house that is otherwise postmodern, so be it. I state my objections, then I do what is asked, walnut-jawed. It used to annoy my ex-wife. Why don't you stand up to them, she would demand. You don't need their business. This is true: grandfather's trust fund provides well. Tell them what awful taste they have, she would say, as if bad taste is a crime. I'm not that good an architect, I would reply. I think she divorced me for my shrug.

Occasionally, an interesting commission comes my way. I was introduced to a retiring oil baron who wanted to build an estate in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, using earth-sheltered design—essentially a building that is set into the earth, underground, or backed into a hill or cliff. I drove out from the coast to meet the client and inspect the site. He owned a remarkable property, perched near the eastern slopes, complete with creeks, blind canyons and yogic cattle content to bask on hillsides and chew their cuds. I admitted that I had no experience with earth-shelter designs, but the challenge intrigued me. He suggested I take a look at Head-Smashed-In. And so it was that I came to be driving a back highway on a sunny July day on the prairie. Taking photos of dead horses.

I have the prints of the two photographs here on my desk as I write. The first, taken as the car hit the pothole, is as one might expect. Askew. The sky occupies most of the frame, overexposed and burned almost white. In the top left corner is a dark blotch: the door frame of the car. Running from the centre of the bottom edge to about a third of the way up the right edge, the crest of the knoll defines the horizon. The head and forequarters of the paint pony burst from outside the frame. A very dynamic photo, with its unorthodox composition, its implied action, the rearing horse. The second photograph seems to contain nothing. When the technician at the lab developed the negatives, she assumed this one was a ruined exposure. I asked for a print: a mottled grey background peppered with eighteen seemingly random dark blotches.

III

I had imagined the Head-Smashed-In site as a sharp precipice with a yawning maw below it. I visualized a stampede of buffalo pitching to their deaths down a sheer rock face. Instead, if not for the interpretive centre, you could drive by without picking out the spot from the blocks of hills and deep-cut coulees that surround it. The edge of the escarpment is a soft hump among the foothills. The cliff drops away only eight or ten metres down to a green meadow that stretches in a long slope to a meandering creek.

At the base of the slope, cars and recreational vehicles crammed into the exposed parking lot. I found myself checking for Michigan plates. When I unclenched my jaw, my hands began to shake. Walnuts, I thought, raccoons. I concentrated on the reason I was there. I found my notebook and jotted a few notes:

Glinting chrome, enamel paint, shimmering tarmac. Mob in
T
-shirts and neon caps moving to and fro across slope. Detracts from the understatement of the building. Compromise: public building in the middle of nowhere needs significant space for vehicle access. Nowhere to hide.

Interpretive centre itself handsome piece of architecture from the exterior. Set into steep hills, angles, & exposed façades match the rocky outcroppings of surrounding landscape. Between each level native grasses planted, cover the structural elements.

At the bottom of the page where these notes appear, I've added a single comment, the only documentation of the incident on the road:

Close call w/ a motorhome on drive in. Saw dead horse in field.

I parked in the overflow lot, even further away. As I locked up the car, a courtesy minibus pulled up. The driver was a plump, middle-aged woman. She called out in a flat, sing-song voice: “Give you a ride up the hill.” Her round brown face broke into a wide smile. I read the name on her tag: Lenore.

“No. That's okay. I'll walk,” I said. I realized I was mumbling through clenched teeth, so I added, “Thanks anyway, Lenore.” My voice sounded loud.

Lenore shrugged. “It's a hot day.” I shrugged back, then turned away from her and busied myself wiping down my camera. I heard her clank the door shut and drive away. I snapped a few photos of the exterior from beside the car. Some 250 metres to the right of the centre sat a squat prefabricated shed. I assumed (later confirmed by my tour) this was the actual buffalo jump; I learned that the shed protected the archaeological diggings at the site. I made the last entry that day in my book:

Science and entertainment in conflict.

It
was
a hot day. By the time I climbed up the path to the entrance, my shirt clung to my back and stomach. I could feel the sting of perspiration at my collar and under the strap of my bag slung over my shoulder. My teeth were beginning to ache, especially the right side where I have had extensive restoration work. Crowns and root canals on almost every tooth. When I closed my eyes, the ghosted image of the spotted horse swirled in my view, and the echo of its word filled my head.

I was here to work, I reminded myself, so tried to focus on the architecture. I discovered that my bag was empty save for a half-full bottle of water. I had left my notebook and wiped-down camera at the car. I tried to make them out among the flashes of sun-baked chrome, concerned I had left them on the hood or the trunk deck. I dropped a dollar coin into a telescope on the wide stone patio at the entrance and checked it out. There was my car, sure enough. No sign of the camera or book. I figured that the items were either gone or inside the car, so there was no reason to rush back. Later, I found them in the back seat, where I had no recollection of putting them.

I bought my entry ticket at a glass booth that reminded me of a movie theatre. The baking heat of the sun bore down on the south-facing entrance without respite. I noted a huge overhead door like a warehouse loading dock facing one side of the patio—it seemed a strange utilitarian element, another compromise for a building with no back door. A few planters cast from a rough aggregate were scattered, filled with wilting annuals.

Inside, the air-conditioned cool was both welcome and uncomfortable. One of the guides handed me a map of the building and instructed me how to proceed. I bought a souvenir pen from the gift store, and wrote a note in the margins of the map: “Bldg intended for public access needs map and guide?” I checked the map, then asked the guide for directions to the restrooms, where I washed my hands and sprinkled water on my neck and face.

The centre is designed so that you begin the tour at the top and follow the trail of exhibits back down to the entrance. The levels cascade down through an atrium dappled by the interplay of light and shadows cast from the skylights. I followed the buffalo tracks painted on the floor and caught a ride up in the elevators.

Outside on the plateau above the jump site, the wind blew hard and hot from the mountains to the west, beating down the scrub grasses. The Old Man River snaked through its long wide valley to the south, its course marked by the shimmering willows and cottonwoods. An interpretive guide began to tell the small group on the plateau how his people had structured the hunt at Head-Smashed-In, how they prepared for weeks for the day of the jump. His name was Thomas. His hair hung in long braids over each shoulder, and tassels decorated his pearl-buttoned shirt. He wore faded jeans and topside loafers. He spoke with patience to the tourists. Though I didn't hear the question that was whipped away by the wind, he gave an answer to a woman dressed in tennis whites: “I don't know, ma'am. None of our people have hunted buffalo for over a hundred years.” There was no malice in his voice, no irony, no challenge. He stated it as simple fact.

As I worked my way down through the centre, I became distracted. I kept thinking I was seeing the man from the motorhome, wondering if he was following me, stalking me to exact revenge. For what? My tongue now was pressing hard against the roof of my mouth. The facility was too small, overcrowded with the throng of vacationing families. I scratched more notes in the margins of my map:

Laser-activated displays, bilingual audiotapes English & Blackfoot languages. Space-age technology invokes lifeless replica. Stuffed buffalo poise at edge of 3rd level ready to leap down to cafeteria entrance on the 2nd.

I gazed up at these taxidermically-correct specimens. For centuries—perhaps a millennium—a culture had driven buffalo to jump to their death over a cliff. These carcasses had then been mined for food and tools. I stood in front of a diorama that attempted to explain Blackfoot mythology (only much later did I learn that the people at Head-Smashed-In called themselves Pikuni and Siksika, that those whom whites call the Blackfoot have their own names for themselves). These were peoples and cultures who knew nothing of silicon and iron and coal, who knew song and bone and dung.

In the air-conditioned box of the museum, I started to feel chilly, and I tried to rub some warmth back into my goose-fleshed forearms. I descended to the lowest level. Behind a Plexiglas wall, smudged with the fingerprints of the children of the day, the curators had meticulously prepared a facsimile of an archaeological dig—a facsimile of the very scene that existed in the squat hut a few paces away on the hill outside. Taut strings mapped a grid overlaying the replica. Excavations of varying depths pocked the arranged mounds of earth. Bones and arrowheads and shards of tools had been placed to give the appearance of randomness. Tools of the trade had been arrayed about the diorama: picks, spades, trowels, brushes, cement, plaster, calipers, rulers, notebooks, pencils. I stared at the pencils. Three of them: one angled across the black cover of a notebook. One dangling on a string tied to a clipboard. The third forming part of a triptych that also included a canteen and a pair of work gloves. We have pencils, I thought, but who uses them? Where are the people? I scribbled on the margins of the map what I think was the comment: