Canada (33 page)

Why the change of weather and light produced a change in me and made me more accepting—more than the awareness of time passing—I can’t say. But it has been my experience in all these years since those days in Saskatchewan. Possibly being a town boy (in town, time matters so much) and being suddenly set down in an empty place I didn’t know, among people I knew little about, left me more subject to the elemental forces that mimicked the experience I was undergoing and made it more tolerable. Against these forces—an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving—time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.

DURING THESE EARLY COLD DAYS
I would sometimes see Arthur Remlinger in his three-hole Buick, driving at great speed down the highway, headed west—toward where, I had no idea. Someplace specific, I assumed. Florence’s head would frequently be visible in the passenger’s seat. Possibly they were on their way to Medicine Hat—a town whose name fascinated me. Other times I’d see his car beside Charley’s trailer, the two of them conferring—often intensely. After four weeks, I’d still had no important contact with Arthur Remlinger—which, as I said, was not what I’d expected. Not that I’d have wanted him to be my best friend. He was too old to be that. But that he might want to know more about me, and that I could learn things pertaining to him; why he lived in Fort Royal, and about going to college, and interesting things that had happened to him—all facts I knew about my parents and was the way, I believed, you learned things in the world. Mildred had assured me I would like him and would learn things from him. But his name—which seemed stranger being his name than Mildred’s—was most all of what I knew; that, and how he dressed and talked in the little he’d spoken to me, and that he was American, from Michigan.

As a result, I’d begun to experience misgivings about Arthur Remlinger, an uncomfortable sensation of waiting that involved both of us. Mildred had also told me I should begin to notice things in the present when I arrived to Canada. But once you do that you can believe you conceive patterns in daily events, and your imagination can run away with you, so that you make up what’s not there. What I’d begun to associate with this partial personage of Arthur Remlinger (which was all I knew) was that there must be an “enterprise” attached to him, a significance that was hidden from view and wished to stay hidden, and that made him not predictable or ordinary—which is what Charley and Mildred had both told me I would notice. I’m certain, after the experience of my parents being put in jail, that I was also given to look for what might not be good, where from most appearances there was nothing bad to be found.

There
are
people like that in the world—people with something wrong with them that can be disguised but won’t be denied, and which dominates them. Of adults, I’d only known my two parents by then. They were in no way exceptional or significant, were barely distinguishable as the small two people they were. And they had things wrong with them. Anyone but their son might have seen it from the very beginning. After I detected it about them, and had time to decide what was true, I never didn’t see the possibility of something being wrong again wherever I looked. It is a function in myself of what I call reverse-thinking, which I’ve never been entirely free of since I was young, when there was so much cause to believe in it.

On one occasion, when Mrs. Gedins was busy in the hotel kitchen, I was given a key and sent to the third floor to clean Arthur Remlinger’s rooms—make his bed, clean his toilet, remove his towels and washcloths, wipe the surfaces where dust had sifted out of the old tin ceiling and been blown in under the window sashes.

His rooms were only three, and surprisingly small for a man who had many belongings and left nothing neat or arranged when he wasn’t there. I made no effort not to examine whatever my eye fell on, and looked further than I should’ve, since I believed I’d likely never know Arthur Remlinger better than I knew him then. Knowing so little and wanting to know more had caused me misgivings in the ways I’ve said. And misgivings can be a source of curiosity as well as suspicion.

The dark beaded-board walls of Arthur Remlinger’s bedroom and his small sitting room and bathroom were shadowy with the venetian blinds closed and only table lamps lit, and were hung with a variety of unusual things. A large yellowed map of the United States with white pins pressed in at various locations—Detroit, Cleveland, Ohio, Omaha, Nebraska, and Seattle, Washington. No indication was given for what these might relate to. There was an oil painting framed and hung beside the bedroom window, showing—I recognized it—the grain elevator in Partreau, with the prairie stretching off to the north. Remlinger had said this had been painted by Florence in the American Nighthawk fashion—which I hadn’t understood and couldn’t look up because I’d left my “N”
World Book
volume in Great Falls. Elsewhere on the wall was a framed photograph of four tall boys, young and confident, smiling, hands on their hips, wearing heavy wool suits and wide ties, posed in front of a brick building that had the word
Emerson
above its wide doors. There was another picture of a thin, fresh-faced, smiling young man with a shock of blond hair (Arthur Remlinger, taken years before—his pale eyes were unmistakable). He was standing with one long arm draped over the shoulders of a slender woman in blousy trousers, who was also smiling—both of them beside what my father called a “ball-cap Ford coupé,” from the ’40s. There was a picture anybody would’ve recognized as a family, standing in a straight line, taken many years before. A large woman with dark hair tied severely back, wearing a shapeless, rough, light-colored dress, was frowning beside a tall big-headed man with heavy brows and deep-set eyes and enormous hands, who was also frowning. An older dark-haired girl with a brazen smile stood beside a tall, skinny boy who I felt was also Arthur Remlinger, and who was wearing a boy’s wool four-button suit with too-short trousers and boots. The girl must’ve been Mildred but was unrecognizable. They were posed with a great sand dune behind them. At the side in the picture was a lake or possibly an ocean.

In the corner of the musty room was a standing clothes rack with belts and suspenders and bow ties hung on its brass hooks. A closet was stuffed with clothes—heavy suits, tweed jackets, starched shirts, the floor cluttered with large, expensive-looking shoes, some with pale hosiery stuffed inside them. There were women’s clothes as well—a nightgown and slippers and some dresses I assumed were Florence’s. In the bathroom beside Remlinger’s silver monogrammed brush and combs and witch hazel bottle and shaving articles, were jars of cold cream and a hanging rubber water bottle and a shower cap and a blue decorated dish with bobby pins in it.

On the wall, above the ornamented wooden double bed, were shelves of books—thick blue ones on chemistry and physics and Latin, and leather-bound novels by Kipling and Conrad and Tolstoy, and several volumes with just names on their spines: Napoleon, Caesar, U. S. Grant, Marcus Aurelius. There were also thinner books with titles that said
Free Riders
, and
Captive Passengers
, and
The Fundamental Right
, and
Union Bigwigs
, and
Masters of Deceit
, by J. Edgar Hoover, whose name I knew from TV.

In the shadowy corners of both rooms were tennis and badminton rackets leaned against the wall. There was a record player and a wooden box on the floor beside it containing, I discovered, records by Wagner and Debussy and Mozart. A marble chess board had been placed on top of the record-player cabinet, the chess pieces made of white and black ivory and intricately carved and weighted if you picked them up (which I did). This made me think I could mention playing chess when I saw Arthur Remlinger, and that if I ever knew him better we could play and I could learn new strategies.

In his tiny parlor there was a heavy, round-arm couch with coarse covering, and two facing straight-back chairs with a low table in between, on which was a half-empty bottle of brandy and two tiny glasses—as if Arthur Remlinger and Florence La Blanc would sit facing each other, drinking and listening to music and talking about books. Opposite the tennis and badminton rackets was a tall wooden perch set beside the shaded window, with a thin brass chain wound around the bar and tied in a knot. There was no sign of a bird.

On the wall behind the perch, practically invisible in shadows, was a framed brass plaque engraved with the words “Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.” This had no bearing on anything I understood. On a wooden hook beside the plaque was a leather holster with a rig-up of complicated straps and buckles I recognized from gangster movies to be a shoulder holster. Inside it was a short-barreled silver pistol with white grips.

I, of course, immediately drew the pistol out. (I’d already locked the door closed.) It was unexpectedly heavy to be so small. I looked through the slit behind the cylinder and made out it was loaded with at least five brass-bottom bullets. It was a Smith and Wesson. I didn’t know the caliber. I held the muzzle to my nose in a way I’d also seen in the movies. It smelled like hard metal and the spicy oil used to clean it. The little barrel was slick and shiny. I sighted it out the window at the CP yard, at the rails full of grain cars sitting in the sun. Then I stepped quickly back for fear of being seen. The pistol, I felt, directly pertained to the significance and enterprise I attributed to Arthur Remlinger—more, I felt, than anything else in his rooms did. My father had had his pistol—which I never believed he’d lost, and now believed had been used in a robbery. I didn’t see how by itself it allotted him significance or made him exceptional. The Air Force had given it to him free, after all. But regarding Arthur Remlinger, I did feel this way, and I again experienced the misgiving I’d been feeling—that he was an unknown and unpredictable person. It was a sensation familiar in my mind to feelings about my parents and their robbery and its terrible effect on Berner and me. I couldn’t have said more about what I thought. But the pistol seemed a very definite and dangerous thing. Though Arthur Remlinger didn’t seem to me to be a man who would own a pistol. He seemed too cultivated—which was clearly my error. I wiped the little handles on my shirt to take my finger smudges off and put the pistol back in its holster. I hadn’t cleaned anything in the rooms the way I’d been told to and would have to come back later. But I had the sudden fear of being found out. So that I unlocked the door to the hall, looked out and saw nothing, then quickly went back down the stairs to my other duties.

Chapter 48

A
S COLDER WEATHER CAME ON, AND THE SPORTS
began arriving at the beginning of October (when Americans were permitted to shoot), Charley said he wanted me to devote all my time to “the goose work.” I’d been in my Partreau shack for a month, although as I said, time didn’t seem to pass or mean much to me—not the way it had two months ago, when school was only weeks away, and the long, slow passage of days was what I wished I could command and defeat the way Mikhail Tal mastered a chess problem.

I adjusted to my little two-room house better than at first. It was necessary to use the privy—which I did only after assuring myself Charley wasn’t watching me, and then would never stay long. But there was electricity to operate my hot plate and the ceiling ring and to provide some heat. I could no longer wash my face at the pump due to the chill wind. But I brought my water in at night using a bucket, and bathed by employing a tin saucepan I scavenged from a refuse pit, and scoured myself with a washrag and the Palmolive bar I kept in a tobacco tin to keep the mice and rats from finding it.

I’d dragged one of the two cots out from the back room into the kitchen—my only other room. The back room sat on the north side of the shack, and the new cold wind worked in through the stucco and the laths and whistled through the cracked panes, so that that room, which was lightless, became unwelcoming at night. In the kitchen there was an old iron J. C. Wehrle stove with split seams, and I fed this with rotted boards and pieces of broken-off dead timber and caragana twigs gathered on my tours. I washed my clothes and sheets and kitchen utensils at the pump stand and swept the floor with a broom I’d found, and considered myself to have made a good adaptation to circumstances whose duration and direction I didn’t know. I wanted to get my hair cut at the barber shop in Fort Royal—I sometimes saw myself in the bathroom mirrors at the Leonard and knew I was thinner and my hair was too long. But there was no mirror in my shack, and I had little thought at night for how I looked. I only remembered the haircut when I was in bed, and that I should clip my fingernails the way my father did. But then I would forget the next day.

Several of the cardboard boxes lining the walls in the kitchen I carried into the cold north room and stacked against the window and along the wall to block the cracks and splits opening to the outside. At the drugstore in Fort Royal I bought a purple candle with lavender aroma that I burned at night, because I knew from my mother that lavender promoted sleep and because the shack—cold or warm—smelled of smoke and rot and stale tobacco and human smells from decades of lives lived there. The shack would soon fall down like the rest of Partreau. I knew if I left and came back in a year there would likely be little sign of it.

In the evenings, when I’d finished my meal and my walk and could tolerate being alone (I never felt my situation was truly tolerable), I would sit on my cot and unfold my chess cloth on my covers, set up my four wobbly ranks of plastic men and plot moves and campaigns against idealized but unspecified opponents. I’d never actually played with anyone but Berner. Arthur Remlinger was who I thought about. My strategies usually entailed brash frontal assaults. I would defeat my opponents with sacrificial attacks in the manner of the same Mikhail Tal, who’d become my hero. The endgame would always be reached with lightning speed due to scant opposition. Other times, I would attempt slow, deceptive feints and retreats (which I didn’t like much), making shrewd comments and observations about what my opponent and I were each doing and what he seemed to be planning—while never divulging my scheme for victory. I did this while listening to the old Zenith, whose light glowed dimly behind its numbers and out of which on the cold, cloudless nights emerged distant voices it seemed to me the wind must’ve blown around the world without respect for borders. Des Moines. Kansas City. WLS in Chicago. KMOX in St. Louis. A scratchy Negro’s voice from Texas. Reverend Armstrong’s voice shouting after God. Men’s voices in what I believed was Spanish. Others I decided were French. And, of course, there were the clear stations from Calgary and Saskatoon, bearing news—the Canadian Bill of Rights, Tommy Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. And place-names—North Battlefield, Esterhazy, Assiniboia—towns I knew nothing about but knew weren’t American. I wondered if I might dial in a station from North Dakota, which wasn’t so far away, and hear about my parents being put on trial. I never found such a station, although sometimes when I lay on my cot in the dark, with the Wehrle ticking, I pretended the American voices I heard were talking to me, and knew about me, and had advice for me if I could only stay awake long enough. This and my lavender candle was the way I went to sleep on many nights.