“Thought they shut it down,” I say.
“They did.” Lum stands up and holds his arms out and turns around in the sun.
I see the bulldozer before Lum does. It comes over the ridge silently, its blade held high. It catches the crest and hangs balanced on the edge. Then it lazily pitches forward, waddles down the hill, and wades across the flat.
“Thought they said it was too close to the river.”
“It is.” Lum stops turning. The mud on his face and chest has begun to cake and crack. “There,” he says. “Follow the birds.”
Behind the bulldozer and above, a wave of seagulls breaks over the hill and floods into the coulee. They rush over the machine and tumble into the shadows, flashing in the prairie sun like fire and ice. The machine follows them into the side of the hill, drops its blade, and begins to push at a dark mound. I look at Lum. He smiles and spits on the ground. “Garbage,” he says, his voice hissing into the wind. “The new buffalo.”
As we watch, the bulldozer drags the pile into the light, and for a moment, I can see the boxes and plastic sacks and the drifts of loose debris, and then the machine stretches, effortlessly, and shoves everything over the edge of the slide. The seagulls rise up in a cloud, screaming, and the bulldozer backs up, thrusts its blunt nose into the
earth again, spreads a blanket of dirt over everything, and buries it whole.
“Shit.” Lum drops down into a crouch, his mouth open. He raises his head, turns it to one side, and feels for the wind with his face. He looks wild and fierce squatting there on the prairies, streaked with mud, the river and the land and the sky rolling over his body, and I try to imagine what it must be like to be naked and not be afraid.
I wait by the motorcycle while Lum finds his clothes. He pulls his jeans up slowly, careful not to put any pressure on the bruise. He’s calmer now, but the pain is back, and it makes him stiff and awkward. “I’m going to camp out at the river tonight,” he says.
“She’s not going to come back.”
“Bring a sleeping bag.”
I can feel the skull in my pack. I have forgotten about it and I hope that Lum has, too. “We’ll be wasting our time.”
“And bring some food.” Lum reaches in his pocket and takes out the keys. “Want to give it a try?” He cups the keys in his hand and tosses them to me.
“I guess.”
“Nothing to it,” says Lum, and he limps around the motorcycle and shows me where the clutch is and how to shift up and down with my foot. “Don’t try to steer it,” he says. “Just lean in the direction you want to go.”
It takes me a few tries, but I get the hang of it, and it’s easier than my father’s truck. I guess I expected that Lum was going to ride with me, but he doesn’t. Maybe his hip hurts too much to allow him to sit in the sidecar or maybe he doesn’t want to make me nervous. Whatever the reason, he turns away from the sun and walks all the way back to Bright Water, while I glide in circles through the prairie grass beside him.
A
few summers back, an older couple from Germany rented a Grand Cherokee in Missoula, crossed the line at Prairie View, and headed for Banff. Three weeks after the vehicle was supposed to be returned, the RCMP found it parked out on the prairies, the battery dead, the gas tank empty.
According to the newspaper, Helmut May was a famous fashion photographer and his wife, Eva, was a schoolteacher. When the police found the jeep, May’s cameras were under the maps on the back seat along with a number of rolls of exposed film.
The story of the Mays made the front page of the
Calgary Herald
, and the paper printed some of the pictures from the exposed rolls. All of the photographs were panoramas, landscapes, the sort of thing that you would expect tourists to take. But the neat thing was that everything in the distance, the rivers, the mountains, the clouds, the prairies, was slightly blurry and out of focus, while everything in the foreground, the steering wheel, the windshield wipers, the hood, was crisp and sharp.
One of the curious things was where the Cherokee was discovered. It wasn’t found in the mountains where, if you made a wrong turn, you could wind up getting lost in the web of logging roads and trails. And it wasn’t found in the foothills where you could take a corner or a curve too fast, skid off the road, and slide down an embankment into a river.
It was found standing in the middle of the prairies. On high ground.
Even if you did get yourself lost, you could look out in any direction, whenever you wanted, and see exactly where you were.
When the RCMP finally found the jeep, the Mays were sitting in the front seat with their seat belts fastened. The windows were rolled
up, the doors were locked, and there were no signs that they had ever gotten out.
Robbery was ruled out, and because there were no signs of foul play and nothing to indicate suicide, the cause of death was listed simply as “exposure.”
I
don’t see Franklin’s truck at the corral and my father’s U-Haul is gone, too. I pull the motorcycle up against the fence and wait for Lum to catch up.
“He’s going to charge thirty-five dollars a run.” Lum turns off the engine and pockets the keys. “Six shots.”
“For a motorcycle ride?”
“He’s already called the television stations in Calgary and Prairie View.”
Most of the tourists have gone back to the RV park or have headed off to see the sights, but the buffalo aren’t taking any chances. They stay in a circle at the centre of the corral, facing out. The only sounds are the seagulls squawking overhead and the wind cutting through the grass. The buffalo stand still as stone. They keep their eyes open and their heads low to the ground as they blow into the dirt.
“I have to help my grandmother get her tipi ready,” I say.
“You bring the skull?”
“Yeah.”
“Be sure to bring it tonight.”
“You want to come along?”
Lum looks up at the tent and then he looks out at the mountains. “Time me,” he says, and he hands me the stopwatch.
“You can’t run with a bad hip.”
Lum should be too tired from all the walking to go for a run. And he doesn’t start off well. All the way across the flat, he carries himself tight and pulled off to one side. I figure maybe he’ll loosen up, but by the time he gets to the first rise, he’s still dragging his bad leg behind him. I climb to the top of the fence to see if I can spot him, but he’s already dropped down the far side of the slope and
disappeared into the landscape. I start the watch and leave it hanging on one of the poles in plain sight.
Soldier is waiting for me when I get back to the tent. “You missed all the fun,” I tell him. He is on his feet and dancing around me. “Too late for that,” I say. “It’s time to go to work.”
I think about getting on the motorcycle and going out onto the prairies to find Lum and bring him back, but he has the keys and there’s no telling how far he’ll go this time before he decides to turn around and come home.
My grandmother is in the yard cleaning a chicken. The air is full of white feathers. They settle over the garden like snow and stick to the tomato plants and the zucchini and the corn.
“Just in time,” she says, and she hands me a chicken. The bird is still warm and feels as if it might survive if it gets quick medical attention. “Don’t leave the pin feathers.”
Plucking chickens is not my favourite job, and I’m not very fast. For every bird that I clean, my grandmother can clean four. “I don’t like chicken all that much anymore,” I tell her.
“No profit in being a romantic.”
“No, I mean chickens sort of make me gag.”
“Hand me the knife.”
Soldier looks at my grandmother and the dead chicken in her hand. Behind her, in the coop, the live chickens are clucking happily, but as soon as they see Soldier, they back away from the wire, and the clucking turns hard and suspicious.
“We were just up at the big tent,” I tell her. “You ought to see what Franklin is doing with the buffalo for Indian Days.”
My grandmother gives me a wink and throws a handful of guts against the wire. Some of it gets into the coop, and the chickens forget about Soldier for the moment and stampede over and begin fighting over the intestines and organs. Soldier’s eyes never leave the chickens. His head bobs up and down, and his tongue flops out of his mouth as he watches them climb over each other.
“Don’t know which is dumber,” my grandmother says.
Some of the larger pieces stick to the wire, and several chickens
stuff their necks through the fence, lean around, and begin pecking at the guts from the outside.
My grandmother stands up and wipes her hands on her apron. “Come on,” she says. “It’s too windy out here.” She drops the knife into the bucket on the table and heads for the house. “Carry it for me.” Inside are four dead chickens, plucked and cleaned. I wave the bucket under Soldier’s nose. He pulls his head back and rolls his eyes, until there is mostly white showing. “Leave him outside,” she says as she opens the screen door. “And tell him not to chase the chickens.”
“Come on,” I say to Soldier. “We’ll get the sprinkler.” The minute we turn our backs to the chickens, the clucking becomes happy again.
I tie Soldier to the arbour near the garage and unroll the garden hose. The sprinkler that he likes the best is the small round one that sends the water up in a high arc. When Soldier sees what I’m doing, he gets happy and forgets about my grandmother and the chickens. I turn the water on, and Soldier barks and dashes into the sprinkler and puts his mouth over the spray. Then he turns around and sits on it.
My grandmother is standing at the sink, waiting for me. “Dump them in here,” she says.
I sit at the table while she washes the birds. I can see Soldier through the window sitting on the sprinkler, the water bubbling up from beneath his butt.
“He still likes doing that?” says my grandmother.
“I guess,” I say.
“Here,” she says, and hands me one of the chickens. She takes the others, sits down at the table, and lights two short, fat candles.
“Don’t burn the skin.”
I can see the chickens in the coop. They don’t look anything like what I’m holding. The only way you can tell it’s a chicken is by its feet. The rest of it feels like a lump of cold, wet dough.
My grandmother slowly rolls her chicken in the flame, and the room is immediately filled with the smell of burning feathers. Little wisps of grey and black smoke spiral off the corpse and rise to the
ceiling. I hold my chicken over the flame, but my heart’s not in it.
“Mum’s going to be in a play.”
My grandmother starts to smile and then stops.
“
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
,” I tell her. “Only, it’s a modern version and they’re going to do it with Indians.”
My grandmother leans back in the chair and closes her eyes.
“Carol Millerfeather is going to use Indians instead of dwarfs.”
Nothing.
“Mum may get to play Snow White.”
My grandmother opens her eyes one at a time. She opens them slowly, and now she reminds me of an alligator. “Monroe Swimmer,” she says.
I wait to see if she plans on saying anything else. “What about Monroe Swimmer?”
My grandmother gets the lemonade jar from the refrigerator and puts it on the table. “Maybe Monroe can play Prince Charming.” She gets a glass from the cupboard and places it in front of me.
“Lum and me found a skull.”
“All the girls liked Monroe.”
“You want to see it?”
My grandmother has a peculiar way of making lemonade. At the beginning of the summer, she makes it with plenty of sugar. But each week, as she makes a new jar, she cuts back until there is hardly any sugar in the lemonade at all. Today it is cold and sweet. My grandmother goes to the sink and looks out the window. “What’s he doing now?”
“Monroe?”
“I suppose if you’re a dog,” she says, “it probably feels good to have water sprayed up your bum.” My grandmother wraps the chickens in brown butcher paper and sets them on the drain board. “What kind was it?”
“What?”
“The skull.” My grandmother takes the chickens to the refrigerator and stuffs them into the freezer.
“Lum says it’s human.”
“Ah,” says my grandmother. I like my grandmother. She doesn’t say
no, it’s probably a coyote skull, and she doesn’t look at me as if I made it up.
“It could be prehistoric.”
“Bad luck to play with the dead,” says my grandmother.
“The weird part was it had a ribbon tied to it.” I take the skull out of my pack and put it on the table. “We saw a woman, too.”
My grandmother goes to the door and takes her sweater off the hook. She wears it all the time, even in the summer. She puts it on now, settles in her chair, and lets the skull float in her hands.
“She had a short life,” says my grandmother.
“Who?”
“And she died hard.”
“So, is it prehistoric?”
“But she wasn’t from around here,” says my grandmother. “She’s a long ways from home.”
The burnt feather smell hangs in the air. I look to see if any of the soot has landed on me. My grandmother cradles the skull in her lap and begins humming to herself the way my mother does when she’s thinking. Or when she’s sad. “You boys find a lot of things.”
“Actually, Soldier found it.”
“Ah,” says my grandmother, and she hands me the skull.
“Up on the Horns.”
“Ah.”
The kitchen is cool and dark. The refrigerator hums a little, and the wind makes little shrieks as it catches the corners of the house.
“Mom said I should give you a hand with the tipi.”
“Don’t need any help.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You know what to do?”
“Sort of.”
My grandmother reaches out and squeezes my hand. She doesn’t do it so it hurts, but I’m not sure I could get my hand back without a struggle. “Before you go,” she says, “take some lemonade to Cassie.”
“She staying in the trailer?”
“Where else would she stay?” Wrapped up in her sweater, sitting in the dark, my grandmother looks like a bear.
From the garden, I can see that the outside door to the trailer is open. Auntie Cassie is sitting at the table with her back to me. The small black and white television is on. I rattle the handle so she won’t be startled.
“Lemonade.”
“Come on in.” Auntie Cassie turns the sound down on the television.
“Movie any good?” It’s probably not the question I want to ask, but it’s what comes out.
Auntie Cassie shrugs. “See the guy with the gun?” On the table is the suitcase. It’s open, and all around it the baby clothes are stacked in neat little piles. On top of one of the piles is a red ribbon tied in a bow. “He’s that woman’s brother, and he’s going to kill the good-looking guy.”
“Neat.”
“Another American epic.” Auntie Cassie closes the door behind me and takes the lemonade to the sink. “What brings you out here, nephew?”
There’s a coffee machine that’s too big for the trailer stuffed against the wall on the counter. Fresh coffee is slowly dripping into the pot. I watch it for a moment. At first, it is hardly amber and looks like thin tea. But as the pot fills, the coffee deepens down until it blocks out all light, and as the water rises, I imagine that if something were to slip into that pot accidentally, you might never find it again.
“You hungry?”
“Sure.”
Auntie Cassie pours herself a cup of coffee. She puts it to her lips and sniffs. Each time she takes a sip, she squeezes her eyes shut, smiles, and hunches her shoulders as if someone she likes has just hit her.
“Refrigerator’s right there,” says auntie Cassie, and she sits down at the table and starts folding the clothes.
There isn’t much in the refrigerator. I see a wedge of bologna, some packaged cheese, and a jar of mustard. “There’s bologna,” I say. “You want some?”
“It was here when I arrived,” says auntie Cassie.
“I could fry it.”
“God, no!”
Auntie Cassie holds up a tiny shirt. The whole thing would fit in my hand. It looks like something you would put on a doll. I cut off a slice of bologna, roll it into a ball, and stick it in the mustard.
“What’s that sister of mine up to?”
“She’s going to be in a play.”
The bologna is greasy and a little on the rubbery side, and it takes longer to chew than it should.
“A play?” says auntie Cassie. She puts the shirt down and turns to me. “They’ve got a theatre in Truth?”
“Carol Millerfeather’s going to direct it,” I say. “
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
”
When auntie Cassie picks up her cup and takes a drink, I can really see the tattoo. “It’s a modern version.” Each letter is thick and jagged and bent, as if they were cut into her knuckles with glass. They look like wounds, and they look as if they still hurt. “If you stayed long enough, you could be in the play, too.”
Auntie Cassie looks back at the television. The guy is hitting the woman now. The good-looking guy is standing next to the door getting angry.
“I’d make a lousy Snow White.”
“That’s the part that mum wants.”
“You think I’d make a good evil queen?”
I have forgotten that there are only two parts for women in
Snow White
, and I’m sorry now that I’ve mentioned it.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” says auntie Cassie, and she drops her voice and lowers her eyes.
The good-looking guy is pleading with the woman to take him back. They’re in an old, dark mansion. The only light comes from a candle, and as the woman cries and the man begs, I can see parts of auntie Cassie’s face reflected in the screen.
“Maybe there isn’t an evil queen,” I say quickly. “Maybe in this version the queen turns out to be a good sister who saves Snow White.”
“Saves her from what?”
“Bad guys?”
“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,” says auntie Cassie.
“That’s Humpty Dumpty.”
“Couldn’t save Snow White.”
Auntie Cassie puts her cup on the table, and as she does, she knocks over the stacks of baby clothes. The clothes fan out across the table, slide off the edge and onto the floor. The red bow winds up on auntie Cassie’s lap. She looks at it for a moment, and then turns back to me. “This version have a handsome prince?” she says. “Every woman needs a handsome prince.”
“I guess.”
“Then I’ll be the prince.”
“You can’t be the prince,” I say.
Auntie Cassie bends over and picks up a pair of sleepers, folds them, and starts a new stack. “I thought you said it was a modern version.” She’s not smiling now, and I think that maybe I’ve hurt her feelings.
“Maybe,” I say, “the prince is really a princess in disguise.”
“One thing I do know,” says auntie Cassie. “I sure as hell don’t want to be Snow White.”
“But it’s the lead.”
“Cleaning house for seven dwarfs.”
“Indians,” I say. “Carol is going to use Indians instead of dwarfs.”
“Men,” says auntie Cassie. She takes another sip of coffee. She squeezes her lips together and swallows hard.