Truth and Bright Water (25 page)

“He looks worried,” says Monroe.

“He always looks like that,” I say. I try to find what Soldier has found, but all I hear is the rush of the wind in the grass and the cries of seagulls floating on the wind.

“Well,” says Monroe, and he holds up the skull. “I guess I better get back to this.”

Soldier ignores the skull. He jumps down from the truck and heads off towards the bridge. I start to call him back, but I can see he’s determined, and I know that I can shout until I’m hoarse and it won’t do any good.

“Looks like he’s on a mission,” says Monroe.

Soldier trots down the side of a coulee and disappears into the
fog. I’m fairly sure I know where he’s going, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea.

“You better go find him,” says Monroe. “No telling how far he’ll go this time.” He leans against the truck and straightens the ribbon so it lies on the bone like lines of blood. “When you do,” he says, “ask him not to bother the buffalo.”

I don’t catch up with Soldier. Even though I know where he’s going, he has too big a head start on me. He’s waiting for me when I get to Lum’s camp. Lum is kneeling by the firepit, stirring the ashes with a stick. The Cousins are nowhere to be seen.

Lum doesn’t look up. “They went home.”

I want to believe this, but I’m not sure the Cousins would tell Lum the truth, even if he asked. The hockey stick is gone. So is the sleeping bag. I look around for the basketball and the frying pan and the sack of food.

“Where’s all your stuff?”

“Here,” says Lum, and he holds the skull out to me. “Think this belongs to your buddy.”

“Monroe rescues them from museums,” I tell Lum.

“Cool.” Lum cradles the skull in his arms and smooths the bone with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Anthropologists stick them in drawers,” I say. “Monroe steals them back.”

“Cool.”

It doesn’t sound as interesting as it should, and I’m sorry I don’t do a better job with the story. “Then he puts them in the river.”

Most of the paint on Lum’s face has rubbed away. You can still see some on his cheeks and on his neck, but he doesn’t look as wild as before. “What do you think?”

It’s good to see Lum smile again. “Sure,” he says, “why not?” He dusts his jeans, walks over, and gives Soldier a nudge with his foot. “Let’s do it.” I guess I expect that we’re going to go back to the Horns, but Lum heads for the bridge instead.

“Monroe throws all the bones off the Horns,” I say.

Lum and Soldier walk on ahead. I trail along behind. When we get to the top of the bluff, I look back at the Horns, and if I squint, I
think I can just make out the shape of Monroe’s truck. But it could be a large rock, too, or a shadow cast by the rising sun.

The fence around the bridge has almost collapsed. It lies on its side coiled up in twists and bows, more a hazard than a barrier. I have never crossed the fence, and when I step on the wire, it sways under my feet, alive and dangerous. It would be easy enough to throw the skull into the river from here and that’s what I’d like to do.

“Getting pretty windy,” I shout.

“It won’t hit the water,” says Lum. “It won’t hit the water from here.”

On the far side of the fence, the plywood decking begins. It’s weathered and split, and when we first step on it, it feels thin and flimsy, hollow, as if we are walking on a drum. I don’t much like the sensation and neither does Soldier, but we breathe through our mouths and slide our feet along.

The decking only goes so far before construction stops and the planks and the plywood come to an abrupt halt. From here, as far as you can see, the bridge is nothing more than a skeleton, the carcass of an enormous animal, picked to the bone.

“You smell it?” says Lum. “The whole thing’s rotting.”

From the end of the decking, you can lean out and stare through the dead openings between the ribs and see the fog boil up off the river a thousand miles below. There’s nothing to hold on to out here and the wind knows it. It grabs at my arms and legs.

“Lean into it,” shouts Lum, and when I look at him, I see he’s laughing.

“It’s not funny!”

“Like hell it isn’t!”

Soldier whines and starts edging back towards the fence. This is one of his better ideas, and I’m all for it. “Just drop it, and let’s go back,” I say.

“Back to what?” Lum shouts. He holds the skull up. “Look at you!” He steps off the planks and onto a girder. “You’re pathetic!” He grabs a piece of rebar and begins bending it back and forth. “One useless piece of shit!”

“Come on, Lum.”

“Useless!” The rebar snaps free, and in one motion Lum turns and whips it across his chest. “Where’s your pride, son?” The rebar rips Lum’s shirt, and I can see blood. Soldier tries to leap forward, but I hold him back. “Where’s your pride?” Lum shouts, and hits himself again. And then again. “Where’s your pride?”

“Come on, Lum,” I say. “You’re scaring Soldier.”

“Hey, mutt.” Lum raises the piece of rebar over his head. His chest is bleeding badly. “You want to chase something?”

Soldier growls and barks and tries to get traction on the plywood, but it’s slick, and he loses his footing. “Then chase this!” Lum turns quickly and flings the rebar over the side of the bridge.

“It’s not funny,” I shout.

“Screw you!”

At first, I think it’s just the wind rushing past the girders and the rebar and the wire. But Lum hears it, too, and so does Soldier.

The piano. Over the wind and the fog and the early morning stillness, you can hear the piano. Lum stands on the girder with the skull in his hand. He’s quieter now, and I can feel the rage begin to drain away. “That was my mother’s favourite song,” he says.

“You okay?”

“He can’t play it for shit.”

Suddenly, I’m tired of standing on the bridge and letting the wind beat me. I’ve been up all night, and what I’d really like to do is have some of my mother’s potatoes and go to bed.

“Hey, cousin!” shouts Lum. “Where you going?”

“Home.”

“Come on back. I was just kidding.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Baby wants to say goodbye.” Lum holds the skull out at arm’s length. He slowly opens his hand and lets the skull roll off his fingers. “Bye-bye, baby,” says Lum. “Bye-bye.”

Movies are a lot better at this. In the movies, when something goes off the top of a building or off a cliff, you get to watch it fall all the way to the bottom. In real life, the skull only falls a few feet before it disappears between the girders, and all that’s left is Lum standing there, his head down, his arms at his side.

“Did you see how easy that was?”

“Monroe couldn’t have done a better job,” I say.

“Nothing to it. All you have to do is let go.” Lum looks exhausted. Soldier leans forward and pulls me along, and we go back out on the planks again to get him.

“Come on, man,” I tell Lum, and I put my arms around him and coax him away from the edge. He feels thin and cold and weak, and I wonder if Soldier and I will have to carry him back to town. “How about we go to Railman’s?” I say. “Skee makes a pretty good breakfast. We could even jog in if you liked and get ready for next year’s race.”

Lum nods. There’s blood all over his shirt. His hair is matted and greasy, and he smells bad. But he’s smiling now, and I can see that everything is going to be all right. “I can really run, you know.”

“That Cree guy wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Here.” Lum smiles and hands me his stopwatch. “Time me.” He turns and faces Bright Water. “You know what I’m going to do when I hit the finish line?”

“Come on, Lum.”

Lum starts across the planks, his arms against his side, his body leaning forward slightly at the hips. “I’m going to keep on going until I feel like stopping!”

“Lum!”

His first steps are heavy and taken in pain. He carries himself tight and pulled off to one side, his feet hitting the planks out of rhythm. But as he picks up speed, his body uncoils and stretches out.

“Lum!”

Soldier shifts his weight suddenly and tears the collar out of my hands. I try to hold him back, but he explodes out on the decking and sends me sprawling.

“Soldier!”

Lum is moving easily now. He glides along the naked girders gracefully, Soldier hard on his heels and closing, until the curve of the bridge begins its descent into Bright Water and Lum and Soldier disappear over the edge.

“Soldier!”

The fog swirls up through the holes in the bridge. I make my way through the maze of girders and steel I-beams, listening for the sound of running or the crack of Soldier’s feet on the planks.

“Lum!”

I’m hoping that this is one of his lousy jokes, that I’ll find Lum and Soldier crouched down and perched on a lower girder or resting on the wire mesh, having a good laugh. Or I’ll spot the two of them safe in the river, chasing each other down the rapids.

But the bridge is empty, and all I see in the distance is the lights of Bright Water and all I see below me is the fog. And all I hear is the wind and the faint strains of the piano rising out of the land with the sun.

M
ost everybody on the reserve showed up for Lum’s funeral, and even some of the people from Truth came, too. My mother and my grandmother and Lucy Rabbit were there, of course. So was Skee Gardipeau, which surprised me. I didn’t think he and Lum were friends, but Skee said that funerals weren’t about friendship.

“You come on by afterwards,” said Skee. “The special is on me.”

Monroe showed up, and he stood with me and my mother and auntie Cassie. Franklin stood by himself in his black suit and never said a word. Two of Lum’s aunties from Brocket drove to Bright Water for the service, but they wouldn’t shake Franklin’s hand or tell him how sorry they were for his loss.

It took the police a couple of days to find Lum’s body. They went up and down the river hauling all sorts of junk out of the water. They found the usual stuff, tires, car parts, a lawn mower, a mattress. Farther on, they ran across a bunch of yellow barrels washed up on a sandbar.

They never found Soldier, but I don’t know that they were really looking for him.

I
’m sitting in the shop, finishing breakfast and watching my mother clean the sink, when Lucy Rabbit opens the door and sticks her head in. “All set?” she says to my mother.

My mother smiles, but all she really wants to do right now is clean the sink.

“Nervous?”

“A little,” says my mother.

“Marilyn was always nervous,” says Lucy. “Even after she became a big star.”

My mother has carnations in the vase in the window. They’re not my favourites, but they last longer than roses or daffodils or gladiolas.

“Nice piano,” says Lucy. “When’d you get this?”

“Monroe Swimmer brought it by,” says my mother.

Lucy cocks her head at me. “You play piano?”

“No.”

“But he wants to learn,” says my mother.

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Classical,” says my mother.

“Forget that,” says Lucy. “Rock and roll is more fun.”

When Monroe showed up with the piano, I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted one, but he said you couldn’t refuse a gift.

“Bad luck?”

“Worse,” he said. “Bad manners.”

The piano wouldn’t fit through the doorway to the back area, so we had to set it up in the shop against the wall. It looked pretty good there, and everyone who came by said nice things about it.

“Can you play anything yet?” says Lucy.

I shake my head.

“Go ahead,” says my mother. “Show her what you can do.”

“She doesn’t want to hear.”

“Yes, I do,” says Lucy.

“I have to get going,” I say.

“For me,” says my mother.

Lucy shuts the door and sits down in the chair and waits. My mother stands against the sink with the scrub brush in her hand. You can see that both of them are determined. So, I play a little bit of what Monroe showed me. It isn’t much, but I don’t make any big mistakes. When I finish, Lucy and my mother clap.

“I know that song,” says Lucy.

“Everybody knows that song,” says my mother. “Monroe showed him how to play it.”

I close the piano and head for the door.

“Where you going, honey?” She has that concerned tone in her voice again.

“Out.”

“You going to the river?”

“Who knows.”

My mother looks at Lucy to see if she’s going to get any help. “Just be careful.”

“And don’t forget tonight,” says Lucy. “Wouldn’t want to miss the debut of your mother’s new career.”

My mother goes back to scrubbing the sink. Lucy stays in the chair, her hair bright and crisp, but she doesn’t hum a song as she normally does, and she doesn’t spin around in the chair.

“What’s up, Doc?” I say.

“Ah,” says Lucy, her eyes filling up. “It’s the wascally wabbit.”

My father arrived at the funeral late, and even though he did a good job of standing up straight, you could see he had been drinking. My grandmother stood next to my mother and snarled at him whenever he looked as if he might wander our way. When the funeral was over, he caught up to me.

“Figured I’d get you another dog,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

“Don’t want another dog.”

“I don’t mean right away.”

“Don’t want another dog.”

“You got to feel sorry for Franklin,” said my father. “You can’t imagine how I’d feel if something happened to you.”

Lucille and Teresa and Edna and Wally from the railroad all came over, and each of them told me a funny story about Lum. “You know what he used to say to Lucy?” said Lucille. “That always made me laugh.”

I didn’t see Miles Deardorf at the funeral, but when we got back to the parking lot, we found his business cards stuck under the windshield wipers of all the cars.

I walk the river bank from the bridge to the flat, just like the night Lum and Soldier and I went searching for the woman. I don’t expect to find Soldier alive, but I am happy that no one has found his body either. There’s always the chance that he survived the fall but was injured and lost his memory, and that one day he’ll remember and come home. I saw a movie where that exact thing happened, only it was a man and not a dog.

I can see the buffalo on the sides of the coulees and on the bluff overlooking the Shield. A few of them have wandered off and aren’t where they’re supposed to be, but most of them have stayed put. Monroe said they might move around a bit and that it isn’t a worry as long as they stay in sight.

The river is still high. But later in the summer, when the water drops and the gravel beds and sandbars appear in mid-stream, you’ll be able to wade to the middle and never be in over your knees.

I get up to the Horns around noon and stand on the rocks. Below me, a flock of pelicans skims along the surface of the water, and farther out, flurries of seagulls beat their way towards Bright Water and the landfill. I stand on the edge of the Horns for a long time and look down. The water here is deep and black, and I wonder how it would feel to plunge such a great distance and have nothing to break your fall.

When I get home that evening, my mother is waiting for me. She notices that I am wet, but she doesn’t say anything. “You must be hungry.”

“I’m fine.”

“I made some sausage and potatoes.”

“We had that last night.”

“Eat a little,” she says. “And change your clothes.”

I put some of the potatoes on my plate and sink into the couch. There’s nothing on television, but I stuff a pillow under my head and watch it anyway.

It took Monroe and me and Skee and Gabriel Tucker to haul the piano off the truck.

“How the hell’d you get it on?” said Skee.

“Physics,” said Monroe.

We tied ropes around the top and slid it off on planks. Halfway down, one of the planks cracked and the piano almost tipped over, but Skee used his bulk to steady it, and we were able to ease the piano down onto the sidewalk.

“This thing up to concert pitch?” said Skee.

None of us knew exactly what that was, and neither did Skee. He said it was one of the questions you were supposed to ask when you bought an older piano. “
Reader’s Digest
,” said Skee. “Never know what you’re going to find in
Reader’s Digest.
”

We had to take the front door off its hinges, but that wasn’t difficult, and then it was just a matter of pushing the piano into the shop.

“You know how to play?” Gabriel asked me.

“Middle C,” said Monroe. “As long as you know where middle C is, you can play anything.”

Monroe stayed around for a while after Gabriel and Skee left, and showed me how to play a couple of songs.

“You forgetting something?” he said.

“What?”

“Man’s got to look out for himself,” said Monroe, and he handed me an envelope. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

When my mother came out of the back that morning, she was surprised to see a piano against the wall. I told her we could sell it or give it away, that I wasn’t sure I wanted a piano, but she said no, it was a handsome thing, and even if I didn’t learn to play, it was something nice for the customers to look at. I kept the sculpture of the Indian chasing the elk in my bedroom for a while, but it was dark back there, and in the end, I put it on top of the piano so it could be in the light.

Auntie Cassie comes by after supper.

“You go for a swim?”

“Come on,” says my mother. “I don’t want to be late.”

Auntie Cassie squeezes one of my runners. Water leaks out and drips on the couch.

“Your father’s coming by at seven-thirty to pick you up,” my mother tells me.

“Do I have to go with him?”

“There’s a party afterwards,” says my mother, “so I won’t be home until late.”

“I’d rather come with you guys.”

I can see my mother waver, but auntie Cassie comes to her rescue. “It’s going to take me at least an hour to calm her down,” says auntie Cassie.

“I’m fine!”

“Otherwise, she’s going to pee her pants when she steps on stage.”

My father shows up at seven. He’s dressed in a blue suit and a red tie. “I got married in this suit,” he tells me.

“You look great.”

“That’s what your mother said.”

I get dressed, and we go down the street to Railman’s. My father orders the special. I have the same, but I don’t eat much.

“What’s with the suit?” says Skee.

“We’re going to the play,” I tell him.

Skee looks at my father, reaches out, and runs his fingers along the lapel. “Pretty fancy,” he says. “How’s that chair coming?”

“Almost done,” says my father.

“That right?”

“Absolutely,” says my father. “You can count on me.”

The day after the funeral, the people from Georgia loaded up their RVs and headed out. Lucille Rain said they were heading for Oklahoma, but that they were going to take their time and see the sights.

“That young girl was real nice,” said Lucille.

“Did she ever find her duck?”

“And you missed a wonderful story.”

I would have liked to have said goodbye to Rebecca, to tell her that I was sorry about her duck, that it might turn up yet, that I knew what it was like to lose things.

There are more people at the theatre than were at the funeral, but that doesn’t surprise me. Dying on stage can be funny, and most people would rather laugh than cry. Monroe is sitting in the front row, right in the middle. He’s dressed like my father and he’s not wearing his wig. My father gets us seats in the tenth row. There’s a post that’s sort of in the way, but if you lean out and look around it, you can see fine.

“Aisle seats are always the best,” he says.

The play is pretty good. My father tells me it’s supposed to be a political satire about the federal government and Indians, but I’ve already figured that out.

“It sure as hell’s not
Snow White
,” says my father.

“Mom is great.”

“That Carol Millerfeather,” says my father. “Woman sure has a weird imagination.”

When the curtain comes down, everyone in the theatre jumps to their feet and claps. Then the players come out on the stage, and someone from behind the curtain brings out bouquets of flowers. Standing there in the lights, smiling at the applause, my mother looks like an actress. She really does.

“So, what did you think?” my father asks me as we walk down the street.

“She was good,” I say. “Didn’t you think she was good?”

“Hell of a lot better than the bimbo who played Snow White.”

My mother and auntie Cassie don’t get back to the shop until late. I’m waiting for them on the couch. “Well,” says auntie Cassie, “what did you think?”

“You were good,” I tell my mother.

“Always did want to be an actress,” says auntie Cassie. “And the good news was she didn’t have to die of something that was contagious or embarrassing.”

“You were the best,” I say, but it doesn’t come out clean or in one piece, and I have to put my tongue between my teeth and bite down hard to save myself.

My mother sits down next to me. “You know I love you,” she says, and she touches my face with her fingers. Auntie Cassie sits down on the other side. “You know it wasn’t your fault.”

I’m trying to hold my lips in place, but my mother and auntie Cassie are sitting too close, and everything comes loose. And once that happens, there’s no putting it back. “I miss Lum.”

My mother pulls me to her and rocks me. “I know you do, honey.”

“And I miss Soldier.”

When I get up the next morning, my mother is out in the shop sweeping the floor and cleaning the combs. The carnations are gone and there is a large bouquet of purple flowers in the vase.

“You get those from Santucci’s?”

“No,” says my mother. “I got them after the play.”

“What are they?”

“Freesias.”

“Dad get them for you?”

“No,” says my mother.

“Auntie Cassie?”

“No.”

The next day, the freesias begin to open up and their fragrance fills the shop. It’s a nice smell, like perfume, and I can see why women like flowers. They stay in the front window for a long time, and each day, my mother picks off the blossoms that have died, and carefully trims and cuts the flowers back until there is nothing left but the stems.