The Boy Must Die (20 page)

Crossing reception, Billy went out to the station parking lot and searched for his city map in the tumbled mess he called his glove compartment. Mrs. Morton lived in a new subdivision in the southeast part of the city; Billy remembered it from his high school days as bordering the old stadium. The Pontiac sputtered a little as he drove down Dawson; by the time he turned onto Magrath Drive, the engine had settled. The new Loblaws signalled the street, and it took Billy only a minute before he found the small three-storey apartment building with the red front door. The superintendent, a tall Sikh woman with grey hair, accompanied Billy to Mrs. Morton’s apartment and waited as he
rang the doorbell. There was no answer. “She goes to her sister’s once in a while, I believe,” the superintendent said.

“Do you have an address for her?” Billy asked.

“No. The woman lives outside of the city on a farm, and Mrs. Morton goes by bus.”

Billy drove back to the station. He went through the file on Mrs. Morton once more, phoned the company where she worked as a cleaner, and was greeted by a recorded message saying the company was closed for the holiday. Putting the file back, Billy went to dispatch and asked the sergeant to draft him a search warrant. Then he went to the canteen, found it closed too, and climbed back upstairs to Butch’s office. He began reading through other files and reviewing the taped statements of Bird and Mucklowe. Rubbing his bum knee, he was starting to feel frustrated and fearful. Evidence was not turning up. There were petty delays. He sat back. At least he’d done good work on his father’s honour garden. The other bother was yesterday’s visit with Toshiro. But let that go, he thought.
Don’t let anger get between you and him. Toshiro is the only connection you have left to Arthur.

Billy stood and stretched his arms. He wondered if Butch would be back to work by tomorrow. Time was running out.

“Damn,” he whispered. He sat down on the carpet, pulled his aching knee forward into the lotus position, and began to meditate.
Let it come, let it float. . . .

Justin Moore paused in the open doorway. The brightness of noon sun shining into the hallway reminded him just how early he had awakened this morning. The wall facing the open door showed an Inuit print. A coloured bird dancing on a man’s head.

Justin thought: Maybe Randy can help me.
It won’t hurt to try.

He heard laughter.

“Hello?”

“Is that you, Justin?”

Professor Mucklowe’s voice came from somewhere down the hall. Justin walked towards it.

Maybe he can give me a loan.

The living room lay to Justin’s left. It was a large empty square with one chair and beige wall-to-wall carpet. A glass cabinet stood by the window like a lonely monument in the echoing space. Its top shelves displayed Professor Mucklowe’s collection of amulets and arrowheads. “The Plains Indians,” Professor Mucklowe once said in a lecture, “have sown the prairie earth with their artifacts: spear tips, arrowheads, hatchets.” The dining room was also empty.
Where’s his furniture?

“There you are, Justin. I was afraid you’d forgotten about our meeting.”

Professor Mucklowe was standing beside a blonde student with shortly cropped hair. The kitchen smelled of freshly brewed coffee. The professor’s cotton T-shirt and clean pressed Levis were part of his new image. Last winter he’d cut his ponytail. Justin thought he looked like a mediaeval warlord in a movie.

“How you doing, Justin? Get you a coffee?”

Professor Mucklowe reached out and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Thanks. Just black.”

The blonde was wearing a red shirt and tight-fitting white Bermuda shorts. She smiled immediately at Justin when he came in. He smiled back and watched her lean against the kitchen counter, where she continued to sip from her mug. Justin knew Cara Simonds from Randy’s class. Smart. Friendly. Sometimes too friendly, always trying to help Justin with his studying, offering her time, willing to drive him home some nights after a project in the university library. “Can’t we be friends?” she’d say and smile in her shy way. At least she was good in archaeology, especially with details, and she didn’t mind sharing ideas.

“Hi, Cara,” Justin said.

“Have we met before?” Cara joked. “This’ll be our first dig together, Justin. I’m looking forward to it, aren’t you?”

“Sure. Of course.”

A balding young man Justin’s age sauntered into the kitchen. Justin knew him from history class. David Home was an A student who loved to talk about the Old West. He had asked Justin to go on the dig this summer. “You’ll love it, Justin,” David had said, his eagerness and enthusiasm lighting up his pale thin face.

“Dave!”

“Justin! Did you get that down sleeping bag?”

“Sure did.”

“You guys will be bunking down in the back bedroom of my cabin,” Randy interrupted. “You can bring along your bags if you want, but you won’t really need them. We won’t be staying up at the Chief Mountain site as we had originally planned. The band council at Browning didn’t think it right to have camping on a sacred prayer site.”

Randy clapped his hands. “Anyway, how ’bout we go down to the den?” He spread his arms to try to herd them out of the kitchen. “I’ve got the slides set up. We can get through this in no time. Help yourselves to more coffee. Oh, and please get out pens and paper. I need to have all your home addresses and medical health card numbers.”

“Why?” asked Cara.

“For insurance. The university needs the data. Just your home addresses, where you currently live’ll be fine.”

“You mean my mother’s address?” asked Justin.

“Is that where you are living, Justin? If so, I need just that. If you’re in residence, you can add that address as well.”

Randy and David left the kitchen. Cara Simonds poured herself another coffee. She turned towards Justin.

He realized she looked pretty with her new short hair, and he let himself stare at her brown eyes and at her full breasts. Then he stepped back. “You here for extra credits, Cara?” Justin asked, his voice catching a little in his throat.

Cara smiled. “Can I warm up your coffee?” She took hold of the mug, and her fingers lightly brushed against his. She poured the coffee and handed it back to him. “Careful. Don’t burn yourself.” She smiled
again. She then answered Justin’s question. “Not really. I actually wanted to go and work on a sacred site. Randy told me it was one of the hardest field digs he’d ever had to arrange. The Blackfoot band in Montana are very possessive of their history. Who can blame them?”

As she spoke, Justin looked at her mouth, her eyes, the way her hands moved. She was slimmer than Karen. Forget about Karen, he thought. Justin’s stomach rumbled as he pushed the word
abortion
from his mind. There was something peaceful about Cara Simonds.
I wonder if she might have some money?

“Come on, Cara. Randy’ll get upset if we don’t get started.”

“Right.”

The den was at the end of the hallway. A narrow room with a couch and two bookcases crammed with paperbacks. A sliding glass door led out onto a small balcony. Randy sat on the couch while David Home set up a roll screen to the left of the doorway. Cara and Justin came in with their coffees and sat down on the bare floor near Randy’s feet. On a dented metal
TV
table, Randy had set up his old carousel slide projector. The carousel was half full of white cardboard slides. As the group got ready, Randy handed each a small booklet he’d prepared on his computer. Justin flipped his open. On page 1 was a table of contents explaining the nature of the site, the goal of the dig, the expectations of what they might find, and then a couple of Randy’s published academic articles on vision quest sites and Blackfoot tribal history.

“We’ve got a week of hard digging and hot days together. But you’ll find the place we’re going to very nice. You won’t have much free time, except back in Waterton Lakes, where my cabin is. On the way home from Chief, we can stop and swim in the Waterton river. And we can get pizzas and good burgers at Frank’s Café on Main Street. Count on being tired, though. Digging is slow, fussy work. There’s a lot of sifting. Don’t expect a big find. Don’t look forward to discovering a skull or any gold. Mainly think about how to use the dig skills and labelling techniques I taught you last winter. That’s the point of the field trip. You get to work hard for me for little money, and I get to publish and
receive the credit. And, yes, if we do find anything, all of you will be credited, and all of your names will appear on the article.

“Think of this as purely a search mission. We may get nothing. But the scenery will take your breath away.”

Randy clicked on the slide projector. David Home adjusted the height of the screen. He pulled the curtain over the window and then bent over double and walked under the beam of light to sit down next to Cara and Justin. The screen lit up with a front view of Chief Mountain. A square-shaped shale peak, the mountain straddled the boundary of the Canadian plains and the rise of the Rockies. Its immensity belied its distance from Canada; however, as Randy explained. “Chief lies in the state of Montana. Though we like to claim it as one of our mountains.”

Randy went on, “The Blackfoot of both countries do not recognize our political borders. Chief has been sacred to them and a part of their land and rituals for over two thousand years. The screefall base of the mountain remains a place of prayer and supplication. There a man of faith can traverse the invisible line between the human and spirit worlds and communicate with his spirit guide.”

The next slide showed a vast sloping field of stone with open patches of earth and small wildflowers and the sharp edge of a pine forest. “Here’s the screefall. Wear good boots for this. We walk over it; we dig under it; we haul stuff on it.”

Randy clicked again, and the southwest side of Chief was shown — a commercial photo taken of the mountain at sunset to highlight its unique tower-like shape. To Justin, who’d seen Chief only from a distance, the mountain resembled a giant triangle of purple-grey stone. It almost looked as if it had been carved or built on a gravel foundation.

“The Blackfoot, or Blackfeet if you live in Montana, call this peak Nin Nase Tok Que. The King. We whites dubbed it Chief Mountain because it reminded us of a tribal leader in full eagle headdress. Our base camp, Site 125, is at the foot of the peak on the screefall.”

Randy clicked. The vast field of stone was now shown photographed
from another angle. “Looks like a giant football field someone broke up from a pit of boulders,” said David.

“Pretty close,” said Randy. “It’s partially scree — rockfall from the mountain — and partly glacier rock and moraine earth left over from the ice age retreat. Our site is just above the tree line, the line of pines edging the scree. Chief is cracking apart. Last year a large stonefall occurred on the southeast face.”

“Will we be safe up there?” Cara asked.

“Pretty well,” answered Randy. “We’ll be working farther west. We are calling the dig a vision quest for lack of a better word. A young Native would go to the mountain, alone, to fast and pray for a vision — a spirit animal, a sign in the clouds — which would bring him guidance and courage. The band council in Montana has given us a five-day time frame to do some exploratory digging in places where prayer and quests once took place. We’re not sure if this was a burial ground, too. In the past, questors often left behind gifts for their spirit guides. I hope we can locate some amulets, some old beadwork belts — and I mean old. Maybe early nineteenth, late eighteenth century. The cold air and altitude and dry winters can preserve a lot. Luckily, the site was never plundered by ranchers or train track builders. It was too far out, and it’s hard to get to by vehicle.”

“But how are we going to get up there?” David Home’s voice sounded anxious.

“Look.”

The next slide showed a forest of pine and a narrow road. Through the trees, the huge base of the mountain could be seen glowing in the sun.

“A logging road?” asked Justin.

“Deer path. Used by Blackfoot who park down below — like we will — and walk up to the site.”

“So,” added Cara, “if we find artifacts, as you said, the museum in Browning, Montana, gets to keep them.”

“Yes. There will be a Native guide with us at all times. A man named Sam Heavy Hand, from the Browning reserve.”

“To make sure we don’t pilfer?” Cara countered.

“Hey, Cara,” Randy said. “Don’t make us sound like a bunch of grave robbers. This is all above board.”

“Sorry.”

“You’ll be billeted at my cabin in Waterton Lakes for the time we’re on the dig. You won’t need to worry about food or paying for gas since the university has given us a stipend. We can cook at home and take food up to the site, but we can’t camp there. Bring your passports each time we cross into Montana. Bring spending money and take a look at the booklet I handed out. It lists all the stuff you’ll need — boots, first aid, and the rest. Your honorariums of five hundred dollars will be paid out at the end of the dig, as I told you before. Cara, I know you asked if you could take your own car. And, yes, I got it cleared. You can drive over the border if you wish or come in the van.”

“I’ll only need the car in Waterton in case I have to come home fast. My mom is not well, and she may need me to come into town to help her. I told her I could do it after a day’s dig, and she thought that would be all right. If it’s cool with you.”

“By all means.”

“Will the border guards be checking the van every time we cross? For artifacts? Or looking in our pockets?” Justin was asking the question seriously.

“Most likely.” Randy cleared his throat. “It’ll be official only. Once they know us, they’ll wave us through. But we do have to submit a site report every day. Sam will be helping us with that. Any more questions? Please do not forget to give me your addresses.”

Randy gazed around the room. The sun now illuminated the balcony, and Randy stood up and pulled open the curtain.

“Come here, everyone.”

David and Cara and Justin got up and walked over to Randy, who’d gone out on the balcony. Randy was pointing into the hazy light where far off, over the fields and the blue line of the Oldman River, the Rockies appeared. The dark square near the horizon was Chief Mountain.