Knucklehead & Other Stories (12 page)

Altar to scientific method, lacking only the celebrants to guide us.

But I'm not sure. The handwriting is so bad, it might say:

Alter to science terrific or lucky only the cerebral to ground us.

Without the science of discovery could Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump exist? I overheard Thomas answer a question, that they find an average of three arrow points in a day's dig. I wanted to ask, who are “they”? If someone shoots an arrow and no one finds its point—whether the next day or centuries later—does that mean the arrow never existed? What about the man who shot it? The buffalo it killed?

At that moment in the concourse of the lobby, a group of drummers began to play and sing. The rhythm resonated in my breastbone. I turned away from the display and let the drumming pound into me. I didn't recognize the language of the high trebly voices; they sang a discord to my western ears, yet I thought I grasped a meaning to their singing. I let my jaw hang slack, unstuck my tongue from my palate. I felt my chin begin to quiver. Tears collected unbidden, and I closed my eyes. The vision of the Appaloosa materialized and the spots rushed towards me like a herd, and a word resounded inside me to the beat of the chant and the voice of the drum. I let loose a hoarse moan, almost a grunt. A young girl in a polka-dotted dress looked at me, and started to cry. She ran to a man and a woman who crouched down to comfort her. The girl pointed at me. The man stood up, and I thought I saw him taking a step towards me when I turned to leave.

I stumbled past the drummers, trying to find the way out. I glimpsed one of the performers, a youth. He was wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, a black
T
-shirt with a Nike swoosh, jeans and Air Jordan sneakers. His face stretched with intensity as he sang and beat the drum. Grant. His nametag said Grant.

A lungful of hot dry air met me as I went outside. I blinked against the sunshine and wiped at my eyes. My hands were shaking. I licked the back of one and relished the fresh taste of salt. Lenore sat on a bench. There was no shade. She took a last drag from her cigarette, hoisted herself up, and ground the butt out. She nodded in my direction. It was just a nod, but it enfolded me like a hug. “Give you a ride down to your car?” she asked.

I understood the word, I know it still, when I answered, “Yes.”

Sweetwater

The word “lake” stretching to two syllables, six children chanting as the station wagon passes the blank screen of the Sweetwater Lake Auto Cinerama: “I can see the laake! I can see the la-ake! I can see the la-ake!” Through the summer, day and night, the drive-in theatre shimmers like a beacon over the prairie, reflecting the blaze of daytime sun, catching projections of beach party bingos, Godzillas and war movie prisoners from dusk-till-dawn. At the turnoff to the lake, signs announce the Sweetwater Rodeo & Jamboree. The rodeo grounds decked with bunting, manure smells mingling with hot dust, pickup trucks and horse trailers and pitched tents scattered in the cactus flats. The clang of bells on bulls' necks, nickering horses, Marty Robbins whistling through the
PA
speakers.

Sweetwater Lake cannot be found on any map. There are no roads in: only paths of memory. A drive-in theatre still stands, where I watched
Red Line 7000
and
State Fair.
The things I cannot change. My brothers and sisters and I spread a blanket on the ground, sat under the stars, spellbound by images forty feet high. Crickets chirped the soundtrack. There was a rodeo every year.

The lake itself still some miles distant, nestled out of sight in the clutch of drumlins. Yet they chant, “I can see the la-ake! I can see the la-ake! I can see the la-ake!” Six children, ages 6 to 18; three boys, three girls. One set of twins (the eldest siblings
M-F
fraternal), one daughter adopted. Mother and father: home-maker and physician, sun-dressed and sport-shirted. She, joining the children's chant, hands resting on plump belly. He, driving, hands on the wheel at ten and two, left arm sunburning through the open window. A brand new metallic grey 1964 Ford Fairlane station wagon, the colour of stainless steel, trimmed with chrome plate, pulling a rising plume of dust behind on the narrow, arrow-straight gravel road. In the rear-facing jumpseat in the very back, the youngest child, a boy, joins the rest, “I can see the la-ake,” the will of his voice conjuring a body of water, when his eyes see only dust.

Am I that boy? When I write, “the will of his voice conjuring a body of water,” the voice is the scratch of pen on paper, the water a flow of ink. As a boy, I passed a handful of summers in a two-room, rough-built cottage, perched by a lake. It was named something like Sweetwater Lake. An oasis on the prairie, spring-fed, with a natural beach of riffled dunes, ringed by bluffs of poplars with trunks as thick as I was. But this lake, Sweetwater Lake, is not that one, another name. That boy is not me. Did now-me exist in then-boy? Only in the me of memory, scattered in me or my. Mouthfuls of hot sand, chokecherry jelly, the screech of the water pump being primed in the springtime. I caught my hand in the tailgate of a Fairlane station wagon at that lake; my father stitched up the gash. I can feel the scar on my right thumb as it presses the pen. I sat in a jumpseat in a station wagon, watching dust billow behind. I called out for a lake, I pleaded to see water. I am 39 years old. God grant me.

On that last trip to Sweetwater Lake, stopping in Elgin, at the B-A gas station. Hamburgers and onion rings in the restaurant. Jimmy the pump jockey fills the tank and scrapes grasshoppers from the windshield. The eldest sister, Betty, flirts with him as usual, attracted by James Dean looks. His left arm missing, lost to a hay baler. Betty and her twin brother Dallas will leave for college in the east in the next week, and she will never see Jimmy and his stump again.

Near Wonderful, the father spies a golden eagle and stops the car. The family piles onto the shoulder of the highway, eight people shade their eyes from a sky more yellow than blue. The bird rides the updraughts ever higher, drifting into the sun.

Are there towns in Saskatchewan named Wonderful and Elgin where an eagle flew and a one-armed boy pumped gas? Did he wipe the windshield of a station wagon the last time we went to the lake? Did my sister flirt with him? I am 39 years old, but today is my first birthday. I remember this: as a boy, I went with my family to a cottage by the lake. Occasionally we stopped in a town with a name similar to Elgin and a young man with one arm pumped gas. My oldest brother and sister went away to college. I know we sold our cottage by the lake and moved to a city. There are brothers and sisters, but no twins. Only doubles. We once went to a lake, then stopped going. There were annual rodeos. I remember the cowboy.

The boy eating a hotdog wrapped in a slice of white bread. The cowboy knocks at the frame of the door with his boot. Backlit by the evening sun, a tall silhouette, as if two-dimensional, booted, hatted, the screen eclipsing details of texture and colour. The mother opens the door and he steps into life, rangy and ropy, all angles and creases. Into the kitchen: the smell of horse sweat and hay, whisky and liniment. With his left hand, he holds his right arm awkwardly, folded up beneath his chin.

The boy gapes. He stops chewing, breathing, takes it all in. Pointy boots caked with dung, jeans smudged and worn. The faded shirt burnt-orange and white, checked like a tablecloth, with pearly buttons. Face like leather, cut deep in the jowls, permanent squint shielding dust-pale eyes. The cowboy tilts his head back so that he can see under the bent brim of his woven hat, stretching the wattle of his neck tight over a knot of Adam's apple. He darts his eyes about the room, a nod to the mother, a wink at the boy. His smile rides up one side of his face to show gaps where teeth are missing. The boy looks away from his face and stares hard at the outsized belt buckle, where a bronze cowboy spurs a silver bronco. Lettering there: “Bareback Denver 1958.”

With a sound like a bell, the cowboy half-hollers, “Is the doc around? Pete at the hotel said a doctor was here.” The father: up in the loft napping, but awake now. He sticks his head over the edge. “I'm Dr. Leonard,” he announces, fumbles for his glasses, then stretches the wire temples around his ears. The doctor puts on his black-bag face.

(Re)constructing the myth of father-physician. I was barely seven years old when my father traded the practice of medicine for the paper shuffle of hospital administration. Yet how I have clung to that myth! Did I ever believe? Do I still? I admit that I. The knock at the door, the honk of a horn in the street, the middle-of-the-night phone call, my father then grabbing the black bag and flying from the house. Broken-boned cowboys. The thousand babies born. Father-physician mythmaking. What can I comprehend of doctors' strikes and small-town politics? Of botched appendectomies? What wounds were inflicted untangling the corpses of friends from the mangle of farm implements? I know the scar of memory tracing the stitches in my thumb.

The cowboy: “I just busted up my arm.” Dr. Leonard crawls down from the loft, plucks his bag from the high shelf in the pantry. The mother fusses over the cowboy: “Let me get you a chair. I've got some fresh lemonade, just made. I was just going to brew some coffee, would you like some?” The cowboy refuses all. He stands, swaying slightly, two steps inside the room, holding his arm.

Mother to the boy: “Now Marty, go on in the front room so you don't get in your dad's way.”

“In your dad's way.” When I was 24 years old, and my mother was in the hospital recovering from a quadruple bypass, my father levelled his gaze at me. “Don't come between me and my wife.” An overarching pronouncement: mythic, biblical, menacing. His words circumscribing a story in which I was not a character. Am powerless over. Mother as facilitator: micro-managing the dynamics of six children, mother and father. The keeper of secrets, the maker of myths. What do I remember, what do I make up? What was made up for me, the fictions of family rote-learned in the cradle? Where was my father when I was born? At home, asleep.

“Aw, M-m-mom,” the boy pleads. “C-c-can I stay?” He has not taken his eyes from the cowboy. None of his brothers and sisters are home. The cowboy is all his.

“He can stay.” The father not looking up as he searches in his bag. “He'll be all right.”

The doctor washing his hands in a basin of water the mother has poured from the kettle on the stove. Methodical: fingers first, the webs between, the palms, the backs, the wrists. Then motioning the cowboy to stand near the table. The mother has whisked away the dishes and stripped off the tablecloth. A clean bath towel over the surface, stacks of clean washcloths. “So, what have we got here?” the doctor asks.

The mother carefully works the shirt off over the cowboy's injured arm, peeling it away from a xylophone of ribs playing under pale skin. A dark
V
at the neck, burnished forearms. The cowboy: “Not riding the rodeo, gave that up years ago.” The story: handling a string of bucking horses for a stock contractor, moving them around the circuit. A Brahma bull breaks loose from the chute that afternoon and slams the gate back into his shoulder. “Slipped in a pile of horseshit—pardon my speech, ma'am,” he says to the mother, winks again at the boy.

The doctor: “I'd need an
X
-ray to make a certain diagnosis, but you've probably fractured your clavicle—that's a broken collarbone—and you've separated your shoulder—sort of pulled it out of joint.”

“I figured as much. Oh yeah. Busted bones before.” Barking a little laugh. “Broke my back once, too.”

“I'll bandage it and make a sling. You should try to refrain from using your arm or straining yourself for at least thirty days, sixty would be better.”

The cowboy rubbing his chin with his good hand. The skritch-skritch of whiskers. “I'm heading for Oyen next weekend, then down towards Montana. I gotta keep working. Gonna be a piece of work to handle stock with one arm.” He flashes his gapped smile, looking off into the distance of the far wall. Wheels turning behind the dusty eyes, working the angles. “Maybe get some of the boys to give a hand. Can't quit working.”

The doctor bandages the shoulder. The wide adhesive tape as white as the flesh it covers, running over the ribs, a cloth placed under the arm, the shoulder pulled back a bit (the cowboy winces), the upper arm taped to the torso. The cowboy keeps talking: “With this get-up, you're making sure I don't move my arm—Good turnout this year at the grounds, yes ma'am—Hard to figure, but no, not so many injuries as you might think—The weather's good for the crowd in the grandstand, but you best watch your animals in this heat.” The cowboy reaches his good arm across the table and tousles the boy's hair. “You're a quiet little one. What do they call you? I'm Stricklin, but everyone calls me Stick.”

The boy stammering, “M-m-my name's m-m-Morden. Or m-m-Marty.” He repeats, “m-m-Morden … m-m-Marty.”

If you ask me, “Do you stutter?” I can state: “I have never stuttered.” I do not tongue-grope the consonants that shape my history. My pen stitches a row of m's—I hold the key on the keyboard—
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm My initial, the m of me, hums from my lips. The me of memory sputters. The serenity to accept.

The boy's hand out to shake the cowboy's, a hesitation when right meets left. The cowboy grabs and pumps. “We call this the one-wing shake.” Palm rough, like a splintered fencepost. The boy: “Your b-b-buckle's as old as m-m-me.”

The cowboy answers: “Izzat so? I w-w-won it in a p-p-poker game.” Another barking laugh. The boy's hand back in his own lap. He rubs it on his short pants, wiping away the touch of cowboy. The boy moves away from the table to stand by the propane refrigerator.

The doctor rigs a sling. Triangular bandage, wide under the elbow to cradle the bent arm high on the chest. “Try to keep this on, at least until Labour Day.” Exchanging looks: they both know it will be off next week. “And have it looked at now and again until the pain abates—until it doesn't hurt so much.” A scribble of prescription the cowboy says he doesn't want, but the paper tucked into a jeans pocket. “I'm quite serious. The collarbone will be fine—sore for a while, but fine. But that shoulder may never heal if you're not careful. You'll pull it out trying to put your boots on.”