Truth and Bright Water (14 page)

“The Indians?”

“No,” says Monroe, “the buffalo.”

Soldier lies down next to him. The buffalo aren’t going anywhere, so I close my eyes and curl up in the shade of the truck. The wind picks up speed, and as it does, I hear a low moaning hum. At first, I think it’s Soldier having a bad dream, but when I look, I see that it’s just the buffalo leaning into the wind like rocks in a river.

When I wake up, Monroe is gone. So is the truck. The buffalo are still standing on the prairies, and for a moment, they look just like the buffalo on the reserve. I walk to the edge of the coulee and look along the river. I look back to the church. No Monroe. I get Soldier up. He’s dopey and silly and just wants to lie on his back and lick my hands. “Come on,” I tell him, and I clap my hands so he knows it’s a game. “Let’s find Monroe.”

Soldier runs out in a long circle, rushes back past me, and heads up the hill. I walk slowly behind him. Halfway up the hill, I see faint tire marks in the soft earth. “Good dog!” It’s hot, so I don’t run. I figure I’ll go as far as the top, and if I don’t see Monroe or the truck, I’ll just go home. Soldier trots on ahead and disappears in the grass.

I’m not expecting more buffalo, and for a moment, when I get to the top of the hill and they pop out of the grass, they startle me. There are three of them, all facing in my direction. Soldier is nowhere to be seen, but the tracks are easy to see now, and I figure that he has gone on ahead.

“Soldier!”

The tracks go down the hill and up the next. And then there’s another hill, and another and another. I start to turn back, but I figure if Monroe is setting the buffalo up in groups of three and four as he goes, he’ll run out of buffalo before long and can’t be very far in front of me.

Of course, I’m wrong about that. By the time I get to the top of the fourth or fifth hill, I’ve already passed fourteen buffalo, which means Monroe’s been back to the church at least once to pick up a new load. I try walking faster.

I find the truck and Monroe and Soldier at the bottom of a cut. Soldier is chewing on a piece of jerky. As soon as Monroe sees me, he gets up and pulls a buffalo off the back of the truck. “Just in time.”

“Why’d you leave me?”

“You were sleeping.”

“You could have woken me up.”

“What do you think, two or four?”

“I almost went home.”

“Or we could do three.” Monroe drags the buffalo over to a thick bush. “Grab one of the skinny ones,” he shouts. “This is the perfect place for a teenager.”

We make three trips back to the church, and it’s early evening before we’ve hammered in the last spike. Monroe sits on the tailgate of the truck and looks back the way we’ve come. You can’t see the church, and you can’t see the bridge, and you can’t see Truth or Bright Water.

“Look at that,” says Monroe. “Just like the old days.”

I look, but I don’t see much of anything. Besides the river, there is only the land and the sky.

“As far as the eye can see.” Monroe looks at me and I smile. “Wait a minute,” he says, and he runs around to the cab and comes back with the wig. “Here,” he says, pulling the wig over my head, “now you try it.”

I can see even less now. The hair falls in front of my eyes, and the wig itself smells funny. Soldier looks at me and cocks his head. There are times when he looks stupid, and this is one of them.

“Over there,” says Monroe, and I try to follow his finger. “It’s only a matter of time.”

My mother is always telling me to use my imagination, and I guess this is one of those times to try. “Oh, yeah,” I say.

“Each day, the herd will grow larger and larger.” Monroe pushes off the truck and walks up the hill. “Before we’re done, the buffalo will return.”

I take off the wig and put it on the tailgate. Monroe wanders off, talking to himself. I don’t follow him, and he’s too far away to hear. I wonder just how crazy he really is, but I stand on the running board of the truck anyway and try to see what he sees.

All the way back to the church, Monroe tells me what a great job I’ve done and how much he loves my company, and asks if I will come back. “How many buffalo did we set up today?”

“Sixty.”

“That’s a start,” says Monroe.

The light is low now, and from the church, I can see the first four buffalo. “Actually,” I tell Monroe, “it’s sort of fun.”

“Fun!” Monroe spins on me. “Not fun,” he says, low and hard. “Serious. This is serious.”

He takes me by surprise. “I didn’t mean a lot of fun.”

“These buffalo aren’t really real, you know.” Monroe puts his arm around my shoulders and draws me close.

I don’t want to make the same mistake again. “I don’t know,” I say. “They sort of look real.”

Monroe’s face explodes in smiles and tears. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

We stand in front of the church. Monroe keeps his arm around me, squeezes me from time to time as the light turns and slants into the grass. “What do you see?”

“The church.”

“I’m working on that,” says Monroe. “What else?”

“The prairies?”

“How about the sky?”

“Sure.”

“Anything else?” Monroe turns me so I’m facing the iron buffalo.

I don’t want to say that I see the buffalo just in case I’m not supposed to see them. But I’ve run out of options. “Buffalo?”

Monroe smiles and shakes his head. “It would fool me, too,” he says. “But you can’t tell anyone.”

“About what?”

“If they hear about it, it won’t work.” Monroe dips his head and puts his mouth to my ear. “Real buffalo,” he whispers, “can spot a decoy a mile away.”

W
hen Soldier and I get back to the shop, my mother is at the back, sitting on the floor surrounded by postcards and photographs. The place is still a mess. Nothing has been picked up from the night before. I look around to see if auntie Cassie is buried in the couch. Soldier picks his way through the pillows and the wine glasses and bangs his tongue into his water dish until all the water is on the floor. Then he turns himself around and falls down in a twist.

“You remember this?” My mother holds up a postcard with a picture of an old hotel with a lake in the background.

“Waterton, right?”

“Here’s one of you when you were small.”

I’ve seen the photographs and the postcards before. There are a bunch of me when I was a baby and some really old pictures of my grandmother and some goofy-looking shots of my mother and auntie Cassie when they were about my age.

“This is when Cassie and me were at Wild Rose Community College.”

“And that’s dad, right?”

“That’s him.”

“Is that Franklin?”

My mother looks at the photograph for a moment and then puts it back in the box. “No,” she says. “Has Soldier done his business?”

“He’s okay.”

“You should take him for a walk, just to be sure.”

“It’s dark out. We’ve been walking all day.”

“Walk” is one of the words that Soldier knows, and as soon as he hears it, he’s on his feet. He wiggles his way over to my mother and puts his head on her lap.

“You don’t play with this dog enough.” My mother rubs Soldier’s ears. “He needs love, you know.”

“Lum and me take him everywhere.”

“It’s not the same,” says my mother, and she scratches Soldier’s rib cage until his back leg begins jerking up and down. “It’s not the same.”

A couple of months after my father left Bright Water and moved to Truth, my mother began writing letters to cities all over Canada—Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Regina, Toronto, Montreal—and in no time at all, we began getting packages in the mail stuffed with brochures and magazines and maps and posters. As soon as each new package showed up, we’d open it, spread the brochures out on the kitchen table, and compare the new brochures with the old ones. I asked my mother what she was doing and she said she was just looking. I liked the pictures of Vancouver a lot and the ones of Halifax weren’t bad either. I especially liked the cities that were near an ocean with sandy beaches and waves breaking over the rocks.

“What are you looking for?”

“If you could live anywhere in the world,” said my mother, “where would you want to be?”

The Blue Jays were in Toronto, and even though I didn’t follow baseball and even though they hadn’t won a World Series in a while, it was still exciting to think about living in the same city where they were playing. Of course, you could get the same thing in Montreal, and if you liked hockey, you could go almost anywhere.

“How about Vancouver?” my mother said. “How about if we moved to Vancouver?”

“I guess.”

“There’s a good theatre community in Vancouver.”

“Then you could be an actress.”

My mother would smile when I said this, and no matter what city we settled on, you could see that moving out of Bright Water, away from the reserve, and becoming a real actress was one of her dreams.
I don’t want Soldier to run off on me this late at night, so I get the leash out of the drawer. “You want to go for a walk?” I jingle the chain, and Soldier gets even more excited. “You want to go for a walk?” I do this until he gets cranky and begins to bark and jump on me. Then I fasten the leash and let him drag me to the door.

“When you get back, we need to talk.”

“About what?”

“Things,” says my mother, and she begins to pick up the wine glasses and the pillows.

By the time we hit the sidewalk, Soldier has worked up a full head of steam. He arches his neck and makes loud snorting sounds through his nose as he drags me along. I figure he smells something interesting or tasty and is determined to find it. When we get to the fire station, Soldier stops and curls his ears up into knots. Then he sits back, looks into the night, and begins to whimper.

There isn’t much to see, but I look anyway. It would be easier if there were a moon. I flip the leash around like a whip, but it has no effect. I jerk on Soldier’s collar, but all he does is drop to the ground and pull his neck into his shoulders.

“Come on,” I say again, and I tighten the leash and slide the fur around Soldier’s neck up against his head.

“Kick him in the ass.”

The voice scares the hell out of me. I spin around, but all I can see are shadows.

“Man or beast…always works for me.”

“Dad?”

“Scared the piss out of you, didn’t I?”

“Nope.”

My father walks out of the shadows, squats down beside Soldier, and scratches him behind the ears. “How’s your mom?”

“You coming to see her?”

“Why? She busy?”

“Nope,” I say, and now that I can see my father clearly, I can see that he’s had something to drink.

“She with her new boyfriend?”

“What new boyfriend?”

“That why she sent you out to walk the dog?”

“Why don’t you stop in,” I say. “I’ll bet she’d be happy to see you.”

My father shakes his head and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “I’ve got business.” In the alley, I can see the back end of the old U-Haul truck.

“You going across the line?”

“Got to make a living.”

Soldier whimpers once and throws his shoulders into the leash. My father turns and looks out into the night. “Dog sees something.”

At first, all I can see are the stars and the tops of the coulees against the night sky. Then I see the lights, dim and vague, moving along the ridge.

“Parking lights,” says my father. “Someone doesn’t want to be seen.”

“Smugglers?”

“Nope,” says my father. “Hardly enough business for me.”

“Looks like they’re heading for the church.”

“Run across that ground blind and you’ll wind up in a hole. Six feet deep.”

“Maybe it’s Monroe.”

My father blows on Soldier’s ear. “Couple of years back, we heard he was dead.”

“Monroe?”

“And then the sonofabitch turns up here.”

“So?”

“So, he’s not dead.” My father turns and heads for the truck. “Tell your mother I said hello.”

Soldier liked looking at the brochures and he had his favourites. You could tell because his ears would go up and he’d begin to drool. Winnipeg was his favourite. I think he liked Winnipeg best because, in one of the brochures, there was a picture of a large lake, and Soldier enjoyed swimming. He also liked Edmonton and Victoria. Victoria was easy to figure out because most of the pictures showed
the ocean, but Edmonton looked dry and didn’t seem to have any water at all, except for a river.

“How about if we moved to Toronto?”

“I guess.”

“Native Earth Performing Arts is in Toronto.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to move. I was angry with my father for taking off, but if we left and moved away, I might never see him again. And Lum probably couldn’t come with us. I asked my mother about Soldier. She said that cities could be hard on dogs, and I told her I wasn’t going anywhere without Soldier. My mother looked sad then, as if I had hurt her feelings, and she carefully folded the brochures and put them back in their envelopes.

I walk with my father to the truck, and even before we get there, I know what’s in the back. Soldier wrinkles his nose and starts to slow down so that I have to drag him along.

“How you going to get across?”

“Lots of places to cross,” says my father. “Hell, it’s not fucking Russia.”

“Why don’t you just take it to the big dump in Prairie View?”

My father unlocks the back door and throws it open. Inside are the yellow barrels stacked nice and neat. “They don’t want it. That’s a real joke, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“They don’t mind making the mess, but they don’t want the job of cleaning it up.”

“So, where are you taking it?”

“Bright Water,” says my father. “Always try to give my own people the business.”

“Thought the landfill was closed.”

“There’s closed, and there’s closed.” My father shuts the door and sets the lock. “Franklin’s still pissed off about his tent, you know.”

“Franklin’s pretty mean.”

My father’s eyes narrow. “He’s your uncle.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but he beats up on Lum.”

“Hell,” says my father. “Nothing wrong with a spanking from time to time.”

“Maybe you could say something to him.”

“Franklin doesn’t tell me how to raise my kid. I don’t tell him how to raise his.” My father fishes a cigarette out of his pack and lights it. He holds the pack out for me. “Just be glad I’m not like Franklin.”

“I am.”

“Only hit you when you deserve it, right?”

“Right.”

My father smiles at me and taps me in the chest with his fist. “I love you, son,” he says. “You know that, right?”

“Right.”

My father climbs into the cab, the smoke from the cigarette floating around his head like fog. “Tell your mother I love her, too.”

When my father heard that my mother was thinking of leaving Bright Water and moving to Toronto or Vancouver, he got concerned, and the very next day, he showed up on the reserve towing a car. I was playing ball with Lum and Martin and Joseph Fox in the field next to the band office when my father pulled up.

“What do you think?”

“What is it?”

My father put his arm around my shoulder and led me over to the car so I could get a closer look. “This,” he said, “is a Karmann Ghia.”

“Bummer,” said Martin, whose father had a new Dodge pickup and a Chrysler van.

“It’s a convertible,” said my father. “You don’t see many of them.”

“Is it for me?”

My father smiled. “No,” he said. “It’s for your mother.”

“She’ll like that.”

“You bet she will,” said my father. “Got it off a guy in Blossom. Almost stole it.”

The car was small and white. There was only room in it for two people and the interior was spare. I guess it was supposed to look
sporty, but I would have preferred something like Teresa Rain’s Firebird. My father went around to the back and opened the trunk. “How about this?”

I had heard of cars with their engines in the trunk, but the only one I had ever seen in Truth or Bright Water was Eugena Hunt’s Volkswagen.

“Sort of like a Volkswagen,” I told my father.

“It is a Volkswagen,” said Lum.

“That’s right,” said my father. “This is their sports model.”

I climbed in behind the wheel and pushed on the pedals. The carpet was all matted down and there was a long tear in the passenger’s seat. “How come it smells wet?”

“It’s a classic,” my father told me. “A car like this will only go up in value.”

My mother has cleaned up the pillows and the wine glasses and most of the photographs and postcards. She sits at the table with her quilt and a pair of scissors.

“We saw dad,” I say.

My mother has cut a picture of her and auntie Cassie in a circle and is sewing it on the quilt just above the needles. “Did Soldier do his business?”

“We also saw a car up by the church.”

“Because if he didn’t, you need to take him out again.”

The picture of my mother and auntie Cassie is when they were young. My mother has an apple, and auntie is trying to get it.

“Is that going to hold?”

“I guess we’ll see,” says my mother. She brings the needle up through the cloth and very gently pushes it into the paper. “I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“You going somewhere?”

“Maybe Waterton Lake for a day or two.”

“With auntie Cassie?”

“I’ll leave you twenty dollars in case of an emergency,” she says. “And there’s food in the refrigerator.”

“With dad?”

“Do you think you can do that?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be back for Indian Days.” My mother ties off the photograph and cuts the thread. “Make time tomorrow and go to your grandmother’s to see if she needs help with the tipi.”

“She always puts it up herself.”

“She’s not as young as she used to be.”

I’m sorry my mother has put the photographs away. “Do we have a picture of Lum and his mother?”

My mother lays the quilt down and looks at me. “Is Lum in trouble?”

“Nope. Just thought he might like a photograph of her if we had one.”

“Is it Franklin?”

“Dad’s going to talk to him.”

My mother shakes her head. “It’s Franklin’s own fault.”

“The accident?”

My mother carries the quilt to the basket. “I’ll see what I can find,” she says.

My father went to get my mother while Lum and I walked around the car and kicked the tires. Then Lum climbed into the driver’s seat and began turning the wheel and making engine noises. “These things are gutless,” he said. “Eugena’s Beetle used to crap out if it even smelled a hill.”

“It has a stick,” I said. “That’s better than an automatic.”

“If it had an automatic,” Lum said, “it wouldn’t be able to move at all.”

“And it’s a convertible.”

Lum looked at the car and shook his head. “Somebody saw somebody coming.”

When my mother came out, she was surprised. But it wasn’t the kind of surprise that made you feel good or made you want to laugh. The last time I had seen her look surprised like that was when Soldier was a puppy and had done his business next to the couch in the living room.

But my father didn’t see it. He was all smiles and wiggle, as if he
expected my mother had forgotten that he had left us and gone off to Truth. As if he expected that she would take him in her arms and tell him that this was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her. He stood there smiling and waiting as my mother looked the car over.

“What about the child you-know-what?” she said.

“I’m going to put in a new set of points and get all the belts changed.”

“I don’t need a car.”

“As soon as I get it fixed up, you can drive over to Truth or Blossom or Prairie View, whenever you like.”