Truth and Bright Water (20 page)

“My favourite colour is red.”

We stop at the groups of buffalo we set up the day before. Monroe counts them carefully to make sure that every one is there and that none of the buffalo has wandered off and gotten lost.

“Little hard for them to wander off,” I say.

“My favourite piece of music is ‘Classical Gas.’”

“Especially since they’re made out of iron.”

“I like dark chocolate.”

“Especially since they’re nailed into the earth.”

When we get to the long bluff overlooking the bridge, we stop. Soldier is out of the truck in a flash and launches himself into the grass.

“Soldier!”

It’s no use. He’s gone, and I know that I’m going to have to go after him.

“He run off like that a lot?”

“Every so often.”

“I knew someone like that,” says Monroe. “Always running away.”

“What happened to him?”

“What always happens.”

I help Monroe lift two of the larger buffalo off the truck. We drag them out to a small flat and face them so they can see the bridge and the river. And then we turn them so they face the mountains.

“Better go find him.” Monroe sits down in the grass. “I’m going to have to think about this for a while.”

I grab a piece of rope out of the back of the truck. If I find Soldier and he’s having a good time, I may have to drag him back. He could be anywhere, but for the first little while, I can see where the grass is bent over and I have no difficulty following his trail. Every so often, I stop and listen just in case I can hear him ahead of me. It’s kind of fun tracking Soldier, and as I make my way down the side of the coulee, I begin to imagine that I’m an old-time tracker on the trail of game. I take off my shirt and rub dirt on my body to kill my scent and to help me blend in with the landscape, and I get low to the ground and move through the grass as quickly and silently as I can.

I lose Soldier’s trail almost immediately, but from the general direction he was headed in, I figure he’s on his way to the bridge and the river. Maybe this is where he goes when he runs away. Maybe he has a secret place where no one can find him.

On top of the coulee, everything is sunshine and heat. But at the bottom, the air is cool and misty, and I have to put my shirt back on. The sun is beginning to burn away the fog along the river now, and there are long stretches where you can see the grey-green water floating low against the sides of the coulees. But among the cottonwoods and along the low runs of willow, the fog clings to the water, thin and silky, while in the shadows and the deep curves, it lies in dark pools so thick and heavy that nothing is going to move it.

Soldier is waiting for me by one of the bridge abutments. I’m a little
disappointed that he wasn’t harder to find, or that he didn’t try to jump out at me from ambush or, at least, give me the chance to try to lasso him. Instead, he’s lying in plain sight on a blue pad, and at first, I think he’s found another one of those hospital things and dragged it out of the river.

“Soldier, get off that!”

But I’m wrong. It’s a sleeping bag, and even before I see the back-pack leaning against the concrete piling and the hockey stick and the basketball, I know that he’s found Lum. Soldier wanders around the camp, sniffing as he goes. I squat next to the firepit and move my hand over the burnt sticks and the ashes.

Cold.

Soldier lies down next to the sleeping bag, buries his nose in it, and tries to look pathetic. I sit down next to him and tie the rope to his collar.

“Good boy,” I say, which is only fair since he found the camp. “What a good boy.”

Camping out is great as long as you have enough food and it doesn’t rain or snow. Lum and I have done it lots of times. But part of the fun is knowing that you can always go home and get something hot to eat and watch a little television. I don’t think I’d like it much if I had to do it all the time. The sleeping bag is damp. I pick it up and shake it off. Lum’s blanket is rolled up in a ball underneath the bag, and I don’t see it until I trip over it. Soldier sniffs at it, hard, and I can see he’s hoping it’s food.

“Forget it.”

In addition to being wet, the bag also smells sweaty. I unzip it all the way and spread it out on the abutment so it can air. I hear Soldier behind me, and by the time I turn around, he’s busy unrolling the blanket. “Leave it alone.”

Inside the blanket, wrapped up like a baby, is the skull.

I pick up a stick and begin scratching at the ground near the firepit. “Where’s Lum?” Soldier watches me as I write in the dirt. “Go find Lum.”

Soldier creeps forward, puts his head on my leg, and begins to moan so it sounds as if he’s singing. “It’s not a baby.” I wrap the skull
back up in the blanket and set it next to the sleeping bag. “It’s a bone.”

I stand up and look at the message. Just to be safe, I push the stick into the ground as a marker, so when Lum comes back, he won’t walk on the words before he has a chance to read them. I jerk on the rope to let Soldier know I’m ready to go, but he stays on the ground. His ears are tight to his head and the fur on his neck is curled up in folds.

“Calm down,” I tell him, and as I speak, I feel something move at the edge of the camp. Something that flutters in the shadows of the bridge.

“Will he bite?”

Soldier lunges forward, barking, and almost yanks my arm off. I pull hard on the rope and fall over backwards.

“You okay?” It’s the girl from the tent. I roll up on my side and snap the rope to let Soldier know it’s not funny. “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset your dog.”

I get up and brush myself off. Soldier bristles at my side. “He just likes to complain.” I tighten the rope. I can see the collar cut into Soldier’s neck, but his shoulders are set, and it’s like trying to strangle a log.

“It’s all right,” says Rebecca. “He’s just scared.”

Soldier pulls his jowls up so you can see all his teeth. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but I’m not happy with his manners.

“Here,” says Rebecca, “I’ll give you this if you and your dog will help me find my duck.”

I have enough to do already, but it won’t do any harm to keep my eyes open. And I figure that Rebecca will feel better if other people are looking for her duck, too.

She reaches up and undoes the red ribbon from her hair and holds it out. “It’s almost new.” The ribbon floats in the breeze.

“You can keep it,” I say.

“No,” says Rebecca. “You may need it. Maybe your dog would like it.”

Soldier’s fur is standing up now, and I can hear low rumblings rising out of his body like thunder. Rebecca looks across the river towards Bright Water.

“You and your folks staying for Indian Days?”

Rebecca nods. “Then we have to go.” She looks tired, as if she’s walked a long ways today and still has a long ways to go. I wonder if she is one of those girls who eat and then throw up after each meal in order to stay skinny.

“Your duck will probably be back by then.”

“If she’s not,” says Rebecca, “Mr. Ross says we’ll have to go without her. He says the soldiers won’t wait for a duck.”

“So, your folks are in the military?”

Soldier plants his legs and lurches forward. I see it coming and set my feet, and he winds up on his hind legs, his front legs dangling in the air. He’s trying to bark but the collar presses into his throat and cuts off the sound. Rebecca kneels and looks at Soldier, as if she is trying to find something in his eyes, as if the two of them have a secret that they’re not going to share with anyone else.

“Guess I’ll see you at Indian Days,” I say.

Rebecca smiles, turns her back to the camp, and heads for the river and the ferry. In her long dress, in the long prairie grass, she looks as if she is floating.

As soon as he can’t see Rebecca anymore, Soldier calms down. “That wasn’t very nice,” I tell him. He nuzzles my leg. I reach down and scratch his ears, and when I look down, I can see that he has peed all over the ground.

By the time I get back to the truck, Monroe has finished setting up the last of the buffalo. “What do you think?”

They’re all facing the river. Off to one side, Monroe has staked a small buffalo by itself, away from the rest, looking back towards the church.

“Is that supposed to be a baby?”

“Magic,” says Monroe. “If you want the herds to return, you have to understand magic.”

“Where’s the mother?”

“Realism will only take you so far.” He walks over and shakes the baby buffalo to make sure it’s firmly anchored. “Every so often, a calf will get lost or separated from the herd.”

“We’ve got a real herd of buffalo over in Bright Water.”

“If the baby doesn’t make it back to the herd in time, the coyotes will find it.”

I look at the baby buffalo and wonder what the coyotes will think when they come out for an evening and find something like this stuck in the middle of the prairies. They might howl at it and they might pee on it, but I doubt that they’ll try to eat it.

“It’s sad.” Monroe brushes his jeans off and throws the hammer into the truck. “But it happens all the time.”

Soldier wanders out of the coulee and slides over to one of the buffalo and sticks his head through its body.

“You found him,” says Monroe. “Where was he?”

“Down by the bridge.”

Monroe shades his eyes and looks towards the river. “Well, would you look at that,” he says.

At first, I don’t see it. And then I do. A thick twist of dark smoke rising up beyond the bridge on the other side of the river. “Indian Days,” I say. “Everybody’s getting the camp set up.”

“Not that,” says Monroe. “Down there.”

For a moment, I think that Monroe has spotted Lum on one of his runs along the river bottom, on his way back to camp, and I already have my hand up to catch his attention when the Cousins appear.

Monroe closes the back of the truck. “I was wondering where they went.”

The Cousins follow the river and the line of cottonwoods, keeping to the shadows and moving among the trees like a long snake in three parts. They move slowly, fanning out along the shore, circling around the back water as if they’re looking for something they’ve lost.

“When I was a kid,” says Monroe, “I wanted to be a hero.”

We’re too far away to do anything about it, but I’m hoping Rebecca doesn’t run into the Cousins since she and dogs don’t seem to get along too well.

“Everybody wanted to be a hero,” says Monroe.

I wave my arms and whistle to see if I can get the dogs’ attention.

“Lots of great deeds left to do in this world.” Monroe begins waving his arms, too. “But nobody wants to do them.”

The Cousins disappear into the willows. I watch the trees and the deep grass for a while, and then I put my hands down. Monroe keeps waving. “You know what’s wrong with this world?” He holds his arms out as if he’s trying to feel for something in the air. “Nobody has a sense of humour.”

Across the river, the smoke rises into the sky, thicker now and darker, and I can see that I was wrong. It’s not coming from Bright Water or the Indian Days camp.

“Dragons.” Monroe looks across the river at the smoke.

“No,” I say. “It’s the landfill.”

“We spend all our time looking for dragons to kill.”

“Sometimes they set it on fire in order to burn off the garbage.”

“Dragons,” says Monroe, and he shakes his head. “Even in the old days, they were never the problem.”

L
ucy Rabbit figures that Marilyn Monroe is an Indian because of pictures she saw of Marilyn when Marilyn was really young, before she dyed her hair blonde and became a famous star. “She was born on the first day of June,” Lucy told my mother. “Same as me. What about that?”

My mother didn’t say that Marilyn wasn’t an Indian, but she said she was sure that there were other people born on the first of June who weren’t Indians.

“Not many,” Lucy told her.

Then there was the matter of Marilyn’s father. “She never knew her father,” Lucy said. “She was raised by her grandparents.” Lucy had Marilyn’s complete life story, from her birth in 1926 on the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario to her murder by Mafia hit men working for the Kennedys. “She died young, of drugs. Sounds like an Indian to me.”

Lucy worked for the band, and there wasn’t much about a computer that Lucy couldn’t explain. We didn’t have a computer, but if we had and if we’d had any questions about it, we could have asked Lucy. That was how she found out that Marilyn Monroe was an Indian.

“You get on the Internet, and you can go to all these sites that have information on everything and everybody.”

I was sort of intrigued by the Internet. I had heard about it, and sometimes I saw an advertisement on television for an Internet service, but neither Lum nor I had ever really seen the Internet in action.

“You type in a key phrase,” Lucy told me, “and up pops everything on that subject.”

“Neat.”

“So I typed ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ and the first item was her biography.”

“And it said she was an Indian.”

“No,” said Lucy. “It said she married a baseball player.”

Even without a computer, Lucy was formidable. She knew everybody on the reserve and what they were doing. She could trace families all the way back to the old days before Whites arrived.

“When Marilyn’s father left her mother, he went down to the States.”

My mother liked to listen to Lucy, and so did I. She had some great stories and some good gossip, only she told us that nobody called it gossip anymore.

“The information highway,” Lucy said. “That’s what they call it now.”

According to Lucy, Marilyn’s father married a second time and had a son. “You ready for this?” she said. “Elvis Presley.”

I knew more about Elvis Presley than I did about Marilyn Monroe, and I could see this because Elvis did look as if he could be Indian.

“Same sad story,” Lucy told us. “If you put their lives side by side, you’d swear that they were twins.” She brought some pictures of Elvis to the shop and laid them next to some pictures of Marilyn and told us to imagine Marilyn with dark hair. “What do you see?”

“What are we looking for?”

Lucy took a black marker and coloured in Marilyn’s hair, and that made the looking easier. “Two peas in a pod,” said Lucy, and I could see that they might be brother and sister. “You’d really be able to see the resemblance,” she said, “if they had had the same mother.”

When Lucy showed up with her Elvis pictures, I came up with what I thought was a pretty good idea. “Why don’t you go back to your old hair colour?” I said. “Then you’d look like Elvis.”

Lucy said it wasn’t just the physical look she was after. “Marilyn was ashamed of being Indian,” she said. “That’s why she bleached her hair.”

“A lot of people were ashamed of being Indian in those days,” said my mother. “But they didn’t all bleach their hair.”

“And that’s why I want to bleach my hair,” said Lucy.

“Why?”

“So Marilyn can see that bleaching your hair doesn’t change a thing.”

Both Marilyn and Elvis looked pretty good in those pictures, and I was sure that both of them had someone like my mother to wash and cut their hair and to keep it from getting out of hand. Lucy liked to say that you could learn a lot about Indians and life in general by studying the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. “All the women wanted to be Marilyn,” she said.

“Like you?”

“And all the men wanted to be Elvis.”

I don’t think my mother saw much of a connection between Marilyn and Elvis and Indians. “Even if they were Indians,” she told Lucy, “what difference did it make?”

“Elvis actually played an Indian in one of his movies,” said Lucy.

“Lot of people who weren’t Indians played Indians in movies,” said my mother.

Lucy said that times change and that now everyone wanted to be an Indian. “Look at Adolph Hungry Wolf.”

“The German guy?”

“He speaks good Blackfoot and lives in the woods.”

“So?”

“It’s a small world,” Lucy would say. “It’s a lot smaller than you think.”

“Like Marilyn and Elvis?” I said.

“Everybody’s related,” Lucy told us. “The trouble with this world is that you wouldn’t know it from the way we behave.”