“Got just the spot.”
We eat lunch at a café owned by a woman from the Blood reserve near Fort Macleod. “I went to school with her,” my father tells me.
“Probably the only town in America where two Indians own anything.”
“We’re in Canada.”
“Hell,” he says. “I guess that explains it, all right.”
Lunch is pretty good. I have a Houndburger, which is really a cheeseburger, and some fries with gravy. My father has a bowl of Dog du Jour, which turns out to be chicken noodle.
“Where do we go next?”
“You having fun yet?”
“You bet.”
“How old you say you are?”
“Going on sixteen.”
“And you know everything there is to know about sex.”
“They showed us a film.”
“At school?”
“Right.”
“The old in and out, huh?”
“What?”
My father pays the bill and we get back in the truck. As he starts the truck, he begins to laugh. “Little more to it than that, son.” He is still laughing when we turn the truck around and head west.
Whenever you see a dead animal on the road, you generally see magpies. They hop about on the body, pecking and squawking, fighting with each other over the soft parts. Cars don’t spook them. They wait until you’re right on top of them before they give up their dance and head for the sky. Some of them fly right at the car, veering off only at the last moment. They’re easy to see. Even at a distance, you can’t miss them. They don’t blend into anything and they aren’t particularly fast. And you never see a dead magpie by the side of the road.
“Did that sex film have real people in it?”
“Nope,” I say. “Just drawings and stuff.”
“Okay,” says my father, “listen up.” My father has only been married once, so far as I know, but I figure he knows something about sex, so I listen. “And that’s what women want. You understand?”
Some of the stuff is interesting, and some of it is gross.
“Come on,” he says. “Ask me anything.”
I figure that now is as good a time as any. “Why did you and mom break up?”
My father looks at me, and then he looks at the road. “You better ask your mother about that.”
“I did.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said to ask you.”
We stop at a warehouse just outside Blossom and pick up four more boxes. These boxes are larger and have to be loaded on the truck with a forklift. The only marking is a sign at one end of each box that says “This End Up.”
“What’s in the boxes?”
“What do you figure?”
“Giant wood coyotes?” I say, hoping I can joke my father into telling me.
“Hell,” says my father, “nothing that useful.”
The only other thing I can figure is that some animals are smart and some are stupid. From the number of ground squirrel bodies along the side of the road, I’d guess that ground squirrels are close to brain-dead. Deer must be pretty dense, and skunks aren’t much better. Porcupines may be slow, but they’ve got enough sense not to try to cross the road when there’s a car coming. And magpies. Magpies look witless, but in the animal world, they could be geniuses.
When we get to Bright Water, we drive through without stopping. At the top of the hill, my father pulls the truck onto the shoulder. “What do you see?”
“Mountains.”
“Look again.” In the distance, a small herd of buffalo appears out of nowhere and begins wandering in our direction. “One of Franklin’s great ideas.”
“The buffalo?”
“The very same,” says my father.
“They’re kinda neat.”
“Tourists,” says my father. “Franklin figured that a herd of buffalo would bring in the tourists and help fill up Happy Trails.”
“I remember.”
“That was another of his great ideas.”
“The tourists?”
“No, the RV park.”
The buffalo arrive at the fence. They slide along sideways, watching us out of the corners of their eyes. When they stop moving and stand still, they look like rocks. “Vision Quest Tours was last year’s idea,” says my father. “And the junk in the back is part of this year’s disaster.”
One of the bulls puts his head against a fence post and leans into it. Every so often, he looks up and shakes his head. I figure he’s thinking about having a go at the truck.
“Skee’s got a couple of buffalo skulls at the restaurant.”
My father grins at me and hits the horn. The bull flinches, but he doesn’t move. “You know how to tell an old-time buffalo skull?”
“Something about the colour?”
“A hole,” says my father. “All the old-time buffalo skulls have a nice round hole in their heads.”
“Bullet holes, right?”
“Naw,” says my father, “they’re air-conditioning ducts. You still want to drive?” He hops out and comes to my side. As soon as he opens the door and gets out, the buffalo skitter back from the fence. “Only way to learn a thing,” says my father, “is to do it.”
I slide across and behind the wheel. My father climbs in and shuts the door.
“Put your seat belt on,” he says, and he fastens his. “You got a clue how this thing works?”
My father shows me the ignition and the brake and the clutch, and tells me about RPMs and gear ratios and compression. He doesn’t spend a lot of time on any one item, and the more things he tells me, the more nervous I get.
“You’re not going to drive us off a cliff, are you?”
I grab the wheel and shove down on the clutch. As I reach for the ignition, I feel the truck start to roll backwards.
“Wrong way.”
I forget the clutch and hit the brakes. My father jerks forward in his seat. “You got about six hours before the sun goes down.”
I put the truck in neutral and start the engine. My foot’s on the brakes and my leg is beginning to cramp. I put the clutch in, pull the stick into first, and let up on the clutch. The truck lurches forward a few feet and dies. I try it again. Same thing. The buffalo come back to the fence. All of them face the truck this time.
“Those history books you get in school say that railroad sharp-shooters killed off all the buffalo, but that’s not true.” My father leans up against the door and closes his eyes. “Most of them just took off and never came back.”
I start the truck again.
“Your audience is waiting,” says my father. “Try letting up on the clutch slowly and get it rolling before you give it any gas.”
I start it again, and it lurches forward and dies. I do this for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.
“This is fun,” says my father.
I finally get the truck moving. It jerks along in first gear, and I’m doing okay until I have to look down at the knob to see where to go next.
“Second gear!” yells my father, over the whine of the engine.
When I try to shift from first to second, the sound is so sudden and frightening, I forget about the clutch and the gas, and the truck dies and drifts off onto the shoulder of the road. I take a deep breath and look around. The buffalo are gone.
“Just like that.” My father looks out the window at the empty prairies. “Soon as the smart ones got a good look at Whites, they took off.”
“So, where’d they go?”
“That’s the mistake we made.” My father settles into his seat, pulls his cap down, and closes his eyes. “We should have gone with them.”
I try again, and this time I get from first gear into second gear. I see my father smile, so I go for third.
Or maybe ground squirrels and skunks and deer and porcupines and magpies are just like people. Some are lucky, and some aren’t. Some get to drive nice cars, and some wind up by the side of the road.
Each time I start the truck, it gets a little easier. Pretty soon, I’m in third gear most of the time, and all I have to worry about is steering. The road climbs a little and then changes to gravel and begins to narrow. My father signals for me to stop. Below us the prairies open up, and the land curves down into a deep bowl. “That’s where we want to go.” In the distance, set in the high grass, a large tent stands by itself. “Try not to hit it,” says my father.
The afternoon sun glistens off the canvas, and against the summer grass, the tent looks like white ice floating in a gold sea.
M
y mother became a beautician through no fault of her own. One time, I asked her how it happened, and she said it was just one of those things that you did when you were young. My grandmother said it was auntie Cassie’s fault. What I had to understand first, my grandmother told me, was that auntie Cassie was older than my mother by a year, which I already knew. The second thing I needed to know was that my mother always wanted to be exactly like auntie Cassie.
“If Cassie did a thing,” my grandmother said, “your mother would want to do it, too.”
“What kind of things?”
“Just like you and your cousin.”
“Like what?”
After auntie Cassie graduated from high school, she enrolled in a beautician program at Wild Rose Community College in Blossom. The next year, when my mother graduated, she signed up for the same program.
“Couldn’t separate the two of them,” my grandmother told me.
From there on out, my grandmother and the story wandered off in different directions, and all I knew for sure was that somewhere in the middle of her second year, auntie Cassie dropped out of school.
“Why’d she leave?”
“They even used to dress the same.”
“Where’d she go?”
“People began thinking they were twins,” said my grandmother. “If Cassie had decided to jump off a cliff, your mother would have been right behind her.”
“But she came back.”
“Who?” said my grandmother.
“Cassie.”
My grandmother would pull her neck down into her sweater and clear her throat. “Cassie always comes back.”
Where auntie Cassie went and what she did was a mystery. I figured that since my mother was there and since they are sisters, she would know. “You remember when you and auntie Cassie went to beauty school?”
“It was a community college.”
“How come she dropped out?”
“A two-year certificate program.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Today,” said my mother, “anybody with a bottle of shampoo and a pair of scissors can call themselves a beautician.”
“Is that when she joined the American Indian Movement?”
“Cassie?”
“You know, the tattoo.”
“Oh, that,” said my mother.
In the end, all I knew for sure was that after auntie Cassie left, my mother stayed on and graduated and came back to Bright Water with a certificate that said she knew what to do with hair.
One time, when auntie Cassie came home for a visit, I asked her about Wild Rose Community College, and she said she couldn’t remember but that she had probably gotten bored with school and everything, and just left.
“Where’d you go?”
“Could have gone anywhere.”
“What about the American Indian Movement?”
“What about it?”
“Did you go to Calgary?”
“Ask your mother,” auntie Cassie told me. “Maybe she’ll remember.”
What auntie Cassie did remember was the good times that she and my mother had at the college. “We’d have hairdressing parties and invite all the good-looking guys over.”
“Is that where mum met dad?”
“He was in wood shop.”
“I’ll bet you and mum had a lot of boyfriends.”
Auntie Cassie laughed and rolled her eyes. “All the boys wanted to be our friends.”
While neither my mother nor auntie Cassie could remember why auntie Cassie left Wild Rose Community College or where she went, they could remember other things. And over the years, each time auntie Cassie came home and they stopped being angry with each other, the two of them would stay up and tell stories about the good times they had had at school.
They’d always send me to bed before they started, but their voices carried so well that I could lie under the blankets and listen. There were a number of stories I liked hearing, but the one auntie Cassie liked telling was about the night she and my mother went to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
“The night at The Lodge,” auntie Cassie would begin. “You wore that white dress.”
“Long time ago,” said my mother. “Not much point in digging up the past.”
“I wore that red dress,” said auntie Cassie, and she would begin to laugh. “You had your hair up, and I had mine down.”
“Let it go.”
“Remember what he said to me?” said auntie Cassie.
“Not really.”
“Baby,” said auntie Cassie, lowering her voice until it was almost a grunt. “You look good enough to eat.”
“They were both drunk,” said my mother. “You have to remember that.”
“Yeah, but they wore suits.”
The Lodge, according to auntie Cassie, was the fanciest restaurant in Blossom, with real cloth napkins and a waiter who put the wine in a bucket of ice and said he was from Montreal.
“All that yummy food,” said auntie Cassie. “And what do they order? Steak and potatoes.”
“At least the potatoes were baked,” said my mother.
“Yeah,” said auntie Cassie. “But if we hadn’t been there, they would have ordered fries.”
Halfway through dinner, my mother and auntie Cassie went to the bathroom. That’s where they came up with the idea.
“Changing dresses wasn’t as easy as it looked.”
“It was a dumb idea.”
“We were lucky no one came in.”
“What do you mean?” said my mother. “Everyone came in!”
I tried to imagine my mother and auntie Cassie standing on the toilets in their slips, flinging dresses back and forth over the top of the stall, and I have to admit it sounded pretty funny. There were chairs and couches in the bathroom, and after my mother and auntie Cassie got the dresses straight, they sat down in front of the mirrors and fixed their hair. I tried to imagine a couch in a bathroom, but I couldn’t.
“Yours went up,” said auntie Cassie. “And mine went down.”
When they got back to the table, my mother sat where auntie Cassie had been sitting, and auntie Cassie sat in my mother’s seat.
“They didn’t even notice,” said auntie Cassie. “They just sat there and talked about hockey and what kind of trucks they were going to buy when they graduated.”
“They
did
look at our tits.”
“Oh, they did that all right.”
Sometimes auntie Cassie and my mother laughed a lot when they told the story and sometimes they didn’t, but auntie Cassie always did most of the telling.
“We met at nine.”
“We met at eight.”
“They were on time.”
“No, they were late.”
I knew the song was from one of my grandfather’s musicals, but it wasn’t one that I liked all that well. I couldn’t remember the name, but everybody in it talked with a funny accent.
“Ah, yes,” auntie Cassie sang, “they remember it well.”
I figured that the other guy was Franklin, and that after the switch, auntie Cassie wound up with my father and my mother wound up with Franklin. The best part was while they were waiting for dessert. Franklin took my mother’s hand and announced that this was the woman he was going to marry.
“That should have been our clue,” said auntie Cassie.
“As if we had a clue,” said my mother.
I thought the part where my father and Franklin got my mother and auntie Cassie mixed up was pretty funny, and I wondered how long it took them to figure out the switch and what they said when they discovered that they were with the wrong women.