I
don’t figure I’m going to see Lum for the rest of the day, so I head to my father’s shop to see if he was serious about showing me how to drive. If I’m lucky, he’s found the parts for the Karmann Ghia and I’ll get to practise with a sports car, but I can see right away that nothing has happened. The tarp still sags over the seats and the tires are still flat.
My father is bent over his workbench. Wisps of smoke are rising over his shoulder.
“What’re you making?”
“Hey,” he says. “You’re just in time.”
“More coyotes?”
My father holds up a thin piece of wood that has been bent into an oval. “What do you think?” I look at it, but I have no idea what it is. “It’s great.”
“I use a heated awl to make the holes,” he says. “Any fool can drill them.”
Sometimes my father tells me what he’s making, and sometimes I have to guess. “Maybe mom would like one.”
My father stops what he’s doing and looks at me. “A fishing net?”
I look at the oval again. I still don’t see a fishing net. “You just stick it…in the water?”
My father picks up a short piece of wood. “The handle goes on like this.” Now it looks more like a fishing net. My father takes a finished net off the wall. “This is what they look like when they’re done.”
The mouth of the net is a thin wooden hoop that has been twisted once and bent into an oval. The handle is a piece of oak with an inlay of darker wood. The net is woven through the holes in the hoop and held in place with fishing line. My father hands me the net. It’s as
light as air. “The fat cats from the city will eat these up. If I put them in an oak case and sign and number each one, I can get a hundred and fifty apiece.” My father bends over and waves the net around a couple of times, as if he were landing a fish. “With any luck,” he says, “I’m going to be a rich man.”
“Then you can come home,” I say, for no particular reason.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t forget you.” He stands there for a moment without moving, as if he’s thinking about telling me something else, but has forgotten what it was. “How’s it hanging?” he says at last.
“Lum and me are still looking for jobs.”
“How is that nephew of mine?”
“He’s going to win the Indian Days race.”
“He pretty fast?” My father turns the fishing net around in his hands.
“You bet.”
“Living with Franklin, you’d need to be fast.” My father stands up and dusts off his jeans. “You want to make some money?”
“Sure,” I say. “How much?”
“Depends.”
“Smuggling?”
“I’ve got to take some stuff over to Bright Water.” My father holds the net up to the light. “Could use an extra set of hands.”
“What sort of stuff?”
My father reaches over and ruffles my hair. “You’re beginning to sound like your mother.”
I should probably ask my mother if I can go, but since we go to Bright Water all the time, I figure it’s okay.
“You old enough to make decisions for yourself?”
“You bet!”
“All right,” my father says, and he hangs the net back up on the wall. “Let’s get going.”
“Can I drive?”
My father laughs. “My truck?”
“Sure.”
“My truck would whip your ass.”
“Lum drives his father’s car.”
“Franklin wouldn’t let Jesus Christ drive his car.”
When my father moved to Truth, he bought an old U-Haul truck from Gabriel Tucker, who had bought it from the U-Haul dealership just before it moved to Prairie View. Most of the writing on the sides of the truck has worn away, but you can still see where it says “Adventures in Moving.” My father goes to the back and unlocks the door. “Come on,” he tells me. “Give me a hand with this stuff.”
Inside are large barrels set on their ends and stacked two high. My father puts on a pair of gloves and hops into the back. “You’re a smart boy,” he says. “What do you think sells across the line?”
There’s a smell in the back of the truck that isn’t very pleasant. Soldier backs up and waits by the Karmann Ghia.
“Gold?”
“Shit.” My father leans against a barrel and smiles. “Gold sells anywhere.”
“Car tires?”
“Too bulky. Not enough profit.”
“Stereos? Televisions?”
“They do okay.”
“Cigarettes?”
My father rolls a barrel onto the lift. “Not anymore. Those asshole politicians in Canada dropped their taxes and ruined the business.”
“That’s too bad.”
“What’s your mum’s new boyfriend like?” My father rolls another barrel onto the lift, so I can’t see his eyes right away.
“Doesn’t have one.”
“You’d tell me if she did, right?”
“Sure.”
“We’re still married, you know,” he says. “So that gives me some rights.” The lift jerks a bit at first and then lowers the barrels to the ground. “Take a guess,” says my father. Each of the barrels is made out of yellow plastic, and each has a red and white sticker on the side that says “Bio-Hazardous Waste.”
“Radiation?”
“Nope.”
“Killer viruses?”
“It’s the junk hospitals can’t toss down the sink,” says my father.
“Like body parts.”
“Who knows. They just pay me to make it disappear.” My father runs a hand through his hair. “It’s enough to make you want to give the whole thing up.”
“Smuggling?”
“No, marriage.” My father reaches into his pocket and takes out a deck of cards. “Pick a card,” he says.
I pick the ten of diamonds.
“The money card,” says my father.
“We going to be rich?”
My father looks at the rest of the barrels in the truck. “No danger of that,” he says.
We stack the barrels at the side of the shop. In addition to smelling bad, they’re also covered with an oily slick that sticks to my hands and pants. Soldier watches us for a while, but by the time we’ve finished, he’s disappeared again.
“Soldier.”
“Dog’s a hell of a lot smarter than either of us.”
“Soldier!”
“Let him go,” says my father. “Can’t take him with us anyway.”
“Sure we can.”
“They won’t let dogs across,” says my father. “Used to be the same for Indians.” He holds up his hands. The gloves are covered with a reddish-black stain. “Better wash up. No telling where those barrels have been.”
I use the soap with the pieces of pumice in it, and I scrub my hands and arms all the way to the elbows until they hurt, but the smell doesn’t go away and my hands still feel sticky. My father brings the truck around, and I get in on the passenger’s side. “You got a clue how to drive a stick?” he says.
“Sure.”
“If you expect to drive this truck,” says my father, “you’re going to have to learn to lie better than that.” He lights up a cigarette and looks at me. “Bet you don’t drink either.”
“Beer.”
“That right?”
The smoke fills the cab. I start coughing.
“If this bothers you,” says my father, “just tell me.”
“It kind of stinks.”
My father cracks the side window, sucks on the cigarette, and blows a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth. “You know, your mother’s not right about everything.”
You’d think that the air conditioner would pull some of the smoke out, but it doesn’t.
“Started smoking when I was twelve. How old are you now?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen.” My father pushes back from the wheel and looks at the side mirror. “Lots of things in life will kill you faster than cigarettes.”
Just outside Truth, the road climbs out of the river bottom and runs across the plateau in a straight line to Prairie View and the Canadian border. My father has to shift gears as we start up the grade. “Watch this,” he says.
I sit there and wait, but nothing happens. Suddenly, there’s a car passing us as if we’re parked. It’s dark green and has a long, narrow front end. The car streaks up the hill. We chug along behind it, losing ground all the way.
“Now, that’s a car,” says my father.
“Auntie Cassie’s friend had one like that.”
“One of these days, you’ll see me driving one. A red one.”
“Me, too.”
The truck slows and the engine whines, as if someone has stepped on its tail. My father curses and shifts down. “Up ahead,” he says.
Near the top of the grade, I see two figures by the side of the road, and for a moment, I imagine that it might be Lum on his way to Prairie View and Soldier heading out on another of his great escapes.
“Skins,” says my father, and he pushes the accelerator all the way to the floor.
It’s a man and a woman. I don’t recognize them at first. The woman’s thumb is out, and as we pass, I can see that she is trying to
smile. The man looks straight ahead as if he doesn’t see us at all.
“Jimmy and Crystal Sweet.” My father shifts down. “Out of money and out of luck.” I look at my father, but he shakes his head. “Drunker than skunks and twice as mean.”
I watch them in the side mirror until we hit the crest of the hill.
“So, what can I tell you about the world?” My father lights up another cigarette. “Ask me anything you want.”
I shrug my shoulders.
“You know all about drinking?”
“Sure.”
“How about…sex?”
“How many times you been in jail?”
My father smiles and blows smoke against the windshield. “Sounds like your mother’s been telling you stories.”
“Lum told me.”
“It’s no secret,” he says. “What else do you want to know?”
What I really want to ask my father is why he and my mother broke up. But I don’t. “Why we going to Bright Water?”
“Business,” says my father. “Only reason to go to Bright Water is business.”
The sun is hot, and even with the air conditioning, I start to get sleepy. I lean up against the side of the cab. Ahead, by the side of the road, I see a dead ground squirrel on its back with one of its paws sticking up in the air, as if it started across and then had second thoughts or came out of cover to try to flag down a ride.
By the time we get to Prairie View, the truck is so full of smoke I don’t know how my father can see the road. “Border’s coming up,” he says. “Time to get rid of it.”
“What?”
“The grass.”
“Marijuana?”
“Canadian border guards find even a little bit of seed, and they go apeshit,” says my father. “Better lose the booze, too.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Canadian jails are worse than the Mexican ones.”
“But you’re kidding, right?”
“You know why?” My father gears down. We slide through the American border and roll to a stop at a log office with a Canadian flag on a pole. “Mexican jails are full of Mexicans,” says my father, “but Canadian jails are full of Indians.”
A couple of guards come out to the truck and ask us all about liquor and cigarettes, and my father shakes his head and smiles and talks like the Indians you see in the westerns on television. We have to stop by the side of the building so the guards can look in the back of the truck, but there’s nothing there, so it’s okay.
“Welcome to Canada,” the guard tells us. “Have a nice day.”
As we clear the border, my father looks at me. “They love that dumb Indian routine. You see how friendly those assholes were.” He finds a radio station, and we listen to country and western music as we drive north. He stops smoking for a while, and that is a relief. “You ever been to Blossom?”
“Nope.”
“Haven’t missed much,” says my father. “Province only has two cities and Blossom isn’t one of them.”
“I haven’t been to Calgary either.”
“The rest are piss stops and doughnut shops.”
At first, I thought the answer to the dead animals along the side of the road was that some were faster than others. The faster the animal, the less likely it was to get hit by a car. But there were more ground squirrels on the side of the road than porcupines and more deer than skunks. So, speed wasn’t it.
For a while, I thought it might be colour, that some animals were easier to see than others. Ground squirrels were tan and blended in with the landscape. Skunks were mostly black and would be hard to see at night, and around dusk, a deer might look like a pile of dirt. And that would explain the magpies.
I am almost asleep, and at first, I don’t know if my father is talking to me or if it’s someone on the radio running for office. “You know what’s wrong with the world?” My father reaches under the seat and comes up with a bottle. The label says “Wiser’s.”
“Is that whisky?” I say.
“Whites,” he says. “It’s as simple as that.” My father passes me the bottle. I take a sniff. It’s iced tea, and it’s pretty good.
“That’s because they took our land, right?”
“Nope.”
“Because they broke the treaties?”
“Double nope.”
“Because they’re prejudiced…?”
“That what they teach you in school?” My father takes the bottle and has another drink. “Listen up. It’s because they got no sense of humour.”
“Skee tells some pretty good jokes.”
“Telling a joke and having a sense of humour,” says my father, “are two different things.”
We get to Blossom just before noon and pull into a parking lot. There’s a big red sign on a long, low building that says “Lionel’s Home Entertainment Barn.”
“Indian guy owns this,” says my father. “White guy went bankrupt a few years back and had to sell it. Now that’s funny.” We get out and open the back of the truck. “Not many times you see that happen.”
Inside the store, there are rows and rows of stereos and VCRs and disc players. One wall is nothing but televisions all stacked up on each other. If you look hard and use your imagination, it looks like a map of North America. My father talks to an Indian guy who looks sort of like John Wayne, only not as heavy. He shakes hands with the man and heads for the back of the store. I follow him.
“Grab a dolly,” he says. “These boxes are ours.”
I can see why he needs me now. The boxes are large, and they’re heavy. It takes both of us to wrestle them into the truck, and by the time we’re done, I’m really hot and sweaty.
My father pulls the door down and locks it. “Time for lunch,” he says. “You hungry?”
“You bet,” I say.