Canada: A Novel Part 13

"I liked my school." I would've liked it, I thought.

"That's nice then," Florence said.

"Do you know why Mr. Remlinger has me up here?" I asked. I hadn't expected to say that. But I was relieved to talk to someone who seemed to like me.

Florence looked around the side of her easel at the empty street leading to the highway, where the second two-a-day Greyhound was just going by. She looked back at her painting, her brush twitching between her thumb and her index finger. Strands of blond hair went up the pale back of her neck and under her soft hat. She had a mole there that I thought her comb would always catch on. "Well." She was talking as she studied her painting. "Are you worried because he hasn't paid any attention to you?"

"Sometimes." I wished I'd just said yes, since it was true.

"Well, don't let that bother you," Florence said, dipping her brush into a tin can on the pavement at her feet. "People like Arthur don't naturally connect to the world. You can tell that. He probably hasn't even noticed he's ignoring you. He's very smart. He went to Harvard. He may feel it's important for you to get adjusted to being by yourself. On the other hand, people are never going to do just what you want them to. He's doing you a favor. Maybe you're a novelty to him." She gave me a mischievous grin and looked up at the clouds. "And I do always loathe a marble sky." She made a line of X's in the air, using her brush, as if she could paint the sky over. Then she put her brush back in the tin can and left it.

The oil pumper was humming away out in the windy wheat field, not far off, its lever arm smoothly sinking and rising-the only unnatural noise in the air. I'd almost stopped hearing it at night, though I went to sleep listening for it.

I stood behind her and didn't say anything. Florence leaned and set her palette down on the pavement and opened her wooden painter's box, which had s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s fittings and contained clean brushes and silver tubes of paint, several small knives, some white rags and dark bottles of liquid, plus a deck of red-backed playing cards, a package of Export *A's and a small silver flask. High in the sky, inching toward the east, a speck of an airplane appeared out ahead of the moving clouds, the sun against its wings. My father once had sat me in a Scorpion F-89 fighter at the National Guard base, and let me put on the pilot's helmet and move the controls and make believe I could fly it. I wondered what a person would see from an airplane here. The world curving away? The Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River? The Cypress Hills, the Saskatchewan River and Fort Royal and Partreau and Great Falls and everything in between? All in one clear view.

"Arthur told me about the difficulties. Your poor parents and whatnot," Florence said. She took out one of the dark bottles. Then she dumped the liquid from her tin can right onto Manitoba Street, unscrewed the bottle cap, and poured clear fluid into the can. "You'll have an interesting life story to tell. Pretty girls'll like you. We like men with dark pasts. My father was put in jail in Manitoba once. But he didn't rob anything, I guess."

She stuck her brush in the can and waggled it and looked back at her painting in which the post office was the only part that was finished. "On the second other hand, of course," Florence said, busy with her cleaning up, "maybe Arthur sees himself in you. A purer version. I wouldn't think so. But men do that. On the fourth hand, people do things and say things and don't ever know why. Then what they do affects people's lives, and later on they say they knew all about it but they didn't. That's probably why your mother sent you up here. She didn't know what else to do. So. Here you are. That shouldn't discourage you. I'm a mother. It happens. How old are you, dear?"

"Fifteen," I said.

"And you have a sister who ran away?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"And what's her name?"

"Berner," I said.

"I see." She set her tin can with the brush in it back on the ground, picked up a knife and a cloth out of her painter's box, and set to sc.r.a.ping the knots of paint off her palette and wiping the paint on the cloth. None of this conversation was like a conversation I'd ever had. Berner's conversations, wherever she was, were probably like this one, I thought-about why things were the way they were and what you can do about them. Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome.

"How do you know Mr. Remlinger?" I asked.

Florence leaned her sc.r.a.ped palette against the leg of the tripod her canvas sat on, and squeezed her brush tip gently into the white cotton cloth. She knelt on the pavement to perform these acts. I stayed standing beside her. "If I can think back that far." She smiled up at me. Her cloth hat-which was soft black velvet-had been pushed by the wind back off her forehead. The unfinished painting, still on the easel, was also being disturbed. "I . . . met Arthur in the bar of the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, in nineteen fifty. I had a French painter boyfriend at that time. A watercolorist. Jean-Paul or Jean-Claude. We'd been to the football, which I always enjoy. But he got furious at me-for something I said-and departed. And Arthur was right there in the bar. He was blond and handsome and refined and well dressed and smart and slightly eccentric for a younger man, but also something of a gentleman and slightly secretive. He had an interesting dramatic quality. And he seemed angry and bored and out of place-a bit of a confusion-which is always attractive to women. He lived down here for some reason and didn't have any idea what to do about himself. I didn't quite have my car fare back to The Hat. I could've ridden the red bus to Swift Current and switched. But he had a nice car-an Oldsmobile. He didn't own the hotel then. He only worked there. And that was that. What did I say? Nineteen-fifty? He was twenty-something. I was a bit older. And thinner. My mother was still working at Lepke's. I had one child still at home-who's now in Winnipeg. That's my life story in living color." She smiled up at me again, and went back to arranging the painting articles in her box, her red fingernails moving among the contents. I tried to gain a clearer picture of Arthur Remlinger from what she'd said and fit it to the man I'd only barely met. But I couldn't. He didn't seem distinct to me, even then.

"I'm moving into Fort Royal soon," I said, not wanting to say nothing, since I'd asked a question and she'd answered it.

"Which was my brilliant suggestion," Florence said, still on her knees. "Arthur thinks you're fine out here-in your little wickiup. It's interesting to live all alone out here, I realize. Very romantic. But it won't be a fit place when the hunters come. I can't really look out for you, but I can try to be aware of you. Your mother would thank me."

That was true. I believed my mother knew something like this would happen-that a person would notice me and see that I was worth something and not leave me to be lost. I didn't think people who were worth something could get lost forever, even if you couldn't explain everything about yourself, why you were where you were, etc. "Why's Mr. Remlinger here," I said.

Florence stood up stiffly-she wasn't very tall and wasn't slender like my mother. She brushed off her brown corduroy trousers and shook herself all over and patted her arms and the top of her floppy hat, as if she'd gotten cold. I had on my plaid jacket. It was colder now. "It must be Canada out here." She grinned. "We don't always go to places," she said, "sometimes we just end up there. That's what Arthur did. He ended up. *I don't go to America, I leave Paris.' That's what the great artist Duchamp said, who would've thought my painting was a very funny thing." She looked at her painting of the post office and the empty street leading away-the scene in front of us. "I like it, though," she said. "I don't like 'em all." She took a step back and regarded her painting out the side of her eyes, then straight on.

"I like it," I said. I thought if I moved to Fort Royal I would see Florence more, and the events in my life could develop in a more positive way that would include Arthur Remlinger, who I wished I knew better.

"I know this is very strange for you up here, dear," Florence said. "But you just go with the Flo. Okay? That was my thing I said to my children. They got tired of hearing it. But it's still true." She motioned toward her Metropolitan. "If you help me carry my artistic things to my little car, I'll drive you into town and you can get supper. Charley can bring you back. You're a short-timer out here now. You can move in tomorrow." She picked up her painter's box. I took her canvas off her easel, picked up her tin can and her wooden stool and the easel, and we went on to her car. It was my last day in Partreau.

Chapter 51.

There were three items of importance in the thick manila envelope-addressed to Mr. A. Remlinger, Esquire, from his sister, Mildred, but intended for me. One was a letter from my sister, Berner, delivered to our empty house and found there by Mildred, who checked our mailbox for days after we'd all gone. There was a short note enclosed in the envelope from Mildred herself, which said: Dear Dell, Enclosed of regrettable interest. I will drive to their trial in N.D. But only so you will know what has happened. They know your mother had nothing to do with anything. But she was in it anyway.

Your old friend, Mildred R.

Along with Mildred's message was an entire copy of the Great Falls Tribune from September 10th, which made the envelope thick. On the front page was another story about my and Berner's parents. This one said that "an Alabama man" and his wife, who was (again) "a native of Was.h.i.+ngton State," had been driven on September 8th, from the Cascade County jail to the Golden Valley County, North Dakota, jail in Beach, North Dakota, after the waiving of their rights. They had been charged with the armed robbery of the Creekmore, North Dakota, Agricultural Bank, in August, following which they had been apprehended by Great Falls detectives, in their home on First Avenue Southwest. The female, Geneva "Neva" (misspelled) Rachel Parsons, had been employed as a fifth-grade teacher by the Fort Shaw, Montana, school board. The male, "Sydney Beverly Parsons," was unemployed at the time of his capture and was retired from the United States Air Force, where he was a decorated veteran of World War Two and had served as a bombardier. The couple's two children-an unnamed boy and girl-were missing and presumed to be with unidentified relatives. Efforts were under way to return the juveniles to Montana authorities. A "not guilty" plea had been entered for the couple in their first court hearing in Golden Valley County. An attorney had been retained for them. The Great Falls crime rate for the year-the story said-had so far seen a 4 percent rise over 1959.

Printed above the story were the same photographs Berner and I had had left for us by our neighbor, the morning after our parents' arrest, and that made them look like hardened desperadoes. There was also another picture-I took interest in this-showing our parents being led by uniformed officers down a set of steep concrete steps toward a black panel truck with a star on its side. They were in handcuffs-our father was wearing a gaudy, striped, loose-fitting convict suit and looking at the ground where he was stepping so as not to fall. Our mother was wearing the beltless, shapeless dress she'd worn when Berner and I visited her and that made her look extremely small. She was staring straight into the camera, her soft face thin and focused and angry-as if she knew who would see her picture and wanted them to know she hated them (which would not have included Berner and me).

I possess this newspaper still today. I've reread the story and studied the pictures countless times-to remember them. But seated in my cold, drafty, stale-smelling shack, on the side of my cot beside the window, when I saw the second photo and read the story that made our parents sound like any life-long luckless criminals the world would barely notice, then forget (as if this story was all there was to their lives), I felt an odd sensation in my chest, like a pain without an ache. This sensation grew down into my belly the way hunger does, and stayed so that I thought for a while it might stay for a long time, just be there to plague my life in still another way. Of course, my parents looked like themselves, in spite of their prison clothes: my father tall, though thinner, but handsome (he'd shaved and combed his hair for his trip); my mother, impatient, purposeful and intense. Yet they also failed to look exactly familiar to me. Nothing that had happened had been in any way normal. Whatever changes had occurred in them and to them defied any idea I had of familiar. They looked like two people I knew, who I was again seeing across a distance, some unspannable divide, much greater than the border that separated us by then. I could say that their intimate familiarity as my parents, and their ordinary, generalized humanness had become joined, and one quality had neutralized the other and rendered the two of them neither completely familiar nor completely haphazard and indifferent to me. Pa.s.sing carefully down those concrete steps toward the Black Maria that would rumble them away to North Dakota and their future, they had become something of a mystery to me, one I shared (I'm sure) with the other innocent children of criminals. Knowing this didn't make me love them less. But I thought I'd never see them again when I saw this picture. So that who they'd become in such a short amount of time were two people who were completely lost to me. All they seemed to have was each other, but they didn't really have that anymore either.

There was also a satisfaction of a kind to all of this, which may be a surprise to know, but must've made my acheless pain finally go away. I'd worried and worried about our parents' fate over the last month-had waked up worrying. I'd lost weight, grown older and more sober. I sometimes dreamed that they'd come to rescue me in their car, with Berner, but couldn't find me and had driven away. In other words, I'd all but said good-bye to my childhood on the strength of their terrible fall. But now I knew their fate (more or less), and with that could begin to recognize something of my own-which was not a bad thing. Though I was very glad Berner didn't have to see their picture or read the story. Wherever she was, I hoped Mildred hadn't also sent a manila envelope to her. As it turned out she had not.

Chapter 52.

Dear Dell-boy, I am sending you this letter in GF because I don't think you are there but don't know where else to send it. Maybe somebody will give it to you. Mother's funny friend, Mildred somebody, maybe. I hope you are not reading this in the juvenile jail someplace-a terrible outcome if you are. I wonder if you have seen our pathetic parents and what has happened to them these days. I wonder what happened to my fish? I love you to bits, you know! In spite of all. I still have your half of the money you gave me. I thought about you going to their jail cell alone after I flew the coop. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Where are you? I am living in a house with other people. A girl who is also a runaway and who is nice. A handsome boy who left the U.S. Navy without permission because he didn't like a fight. Two other men and a woman are not always here but take care of us just fine and don't ask very much attention in return. This house is on a long street called California Street (naturally). Since I'm in San Francisco. I forgot to say. I have not seen that unfaithful rascal Rudy Red-Daddy. We made a pack to meet in San Francisco on a Sat.u.r.day, in a park called Was.h.i.+ngton Sq. I have not seen him or his mother. If you see him tell him to take care of himself. I don't love him. He could also write to me.

It is strange to write letters to each other like grown-ups isn't it? I wish you would come here if you are able to. I would still boss you around. But you could play chess here. People in the Was.h.i.+ngton Park Sq. also play. You could learn things and be the champion. I have learned that other people (kids) can have problems with their parents too. Not about going off and robbing a bank-not that bad-and maybe committing suicide. But other things. Have you gotten a letter from them? Naturally I haven't. I wonder what they think of me at this point. Do they know I ran away? It's beautiful here and not cold yet and things feel like they are happening. I like being on my own. I've told people about our parents, but no one believes it. Maybe I will quit believing it, too, or quit telling it. I wish I could see you, even though when I left I thought I never would again. I now think we will. I am still on the same earth as you, although I'm glad I'm not in GF, which is a c.r.a.p town and always will be.

Someday I will tell you how I came to get here. I made it without being killed and without being taken too much advantage of or starving to death. Gotta skee-daddle.

Love, Berner Parsons P.S. I thought of some new things. You can write to me at this address, and should. I am glad for the pa.s.sage of time, so you don't have to hurry.

If you saw me you wouldn't recognize it. I have my two ears pierced. I shave my legs and under my pits and have cut my wire mop short and cute. I don't mind my old freckles. I have some b.r.e.a.s.t.s now. The man, Uncle Bob is what we call him, asked me if I was Jewish. I said of course. My complexion has unfortunately blossomed out. I had a job two times as a babysitter if you can believe that for me. I can remember being a baby myself. You still are one, where I'm concerned. I will give you the robbed money you gave me when I see you.

It is too bad we have the parents we have and haven't been luckier. Our life is ruined now, although there is a lot of it left to fill up. Sometimes I miss them. I did-do-have one dream. I killed someone in it, I don't know who, but then forgot all about it. Then it just rises up-the killing I did-and I know I did it and other people do too. It's terrible since I didn't really do it but still have the dream. I wake up later feeling like I've been crying and running a race. Do you have that? Since we are twins I believe we feel the same and see things the same (the world?). I hope it's true. I remember one of mother's poems. I say it out loud to the Navy boy. "Had I once a lovely youth, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold, good luck to spare. Through what crime-" I can't remember it all now. Sorry. It was French. She always thought it was about her, I guess.

Love ya again, Berner Rachel Parsons, your twin

Chapter 53.

The time that began for me in Fort Royal, in the Leonard Hotel, was in every way different from my lonely weeks in Partreau, and superior to them and felt-though it didn't last long and ended in disaster-like a life I was actually living, instead of life at a standstill, the partial life of a person lost on an empty prairie who somehow makes it to shelter but stays lost, and for whom nothing could be right again.

More Sports began arriving. Five or six of them at a time-their big American cars with colorful American license plates parked in the dirt lot out behind, full of their hunting gear that couldn't fit in the tiny rooms. From my little radiator-warm closet down the hall from Remlinger, I'd hear the men's voices up through the floorboards and the pipes, talking to each other in low tones far into the night. I would lie silently in my narrow bed, trying to make out the things they said. Since they were mostly Americans, I felt they might say things I would recognize, and provide me with understandings that would be useful. I don't know what I thought those things could be. I never heard much-people's names spoken-Herman, Winifred, Sonny; complaints about insults or injuries one person or other had suffered. Someone laughing.

At night in the Leonard bar, after Charley and I had gone for our sundown scouting and determined where new pits should be dug (two Ukrainian boys were hired to dig them after dark and cover the clump piles with wheat straw), I usually came back and ate my supper in the hotel kitchen, then pa.s.sed the early evening beside the jukebox in the smoky, noisy barroom, or standing behind the card players in the gambling pit, or talking to the Filipino girls who served drinks in the shadowy bar light and danced with the Sports and sometimes with each other, and who often (as I've said) disappeared with one man or another and then weren't seen the rest of the night. I no longer swamped rooms, so I rarely saw them climbing into their waiting taxi back to Swift Current.

The Americans in the bar were mostly large, loud-talking men dressed in rough hunting attire. They laughed and smoked and drank rye whiskey and beer and enjoyed themselves. Many of them thought that being in Canada was highly comical, and made jokes about having Thanksgiving in October and the strange ways Canadians talked (I'd never much detected it, though I tried) and how Canadians hated Americans but all wished they lived there and could be rich. They talked about the election campaign "down below," how they expected Nixon to overpower Kennedy, and how important it was to fight the Communists. They talked about the football teams where they were from. (Some were from Missouri, others from Nevada, others from Chicago.) They made jokes about their wives and told stories about their children's achievements, and their jobs back home, and about noteworthy events that had happened on other hunting expeditions and how many ducks and geese and other animals they'd killed. Sometimes they talked to me-if they noticed me, or if they'd earlier in the day sent me on an errand to the drugstore or the hardware for some piece of equipment they lacked. They wanted to know if I was Canadian, or if I was "Mr. Remlinger's son," or the boy of some other hunter who was there. I told them I was visiting from Montana, that my parents had gotten sick, but I'd be going home again soon and back to school-which often made them shout out and laugh and clap me on the back and say I was "lucky" to be skipping school and would never want to go back after being a "hunting guide" and leading a life of adventure most boys only dreamed of. They seemed to think Canada, although comical, was mysterious and romantic, and where they lived was boring and corny, yet they still wanted to live there.

At the end of these evenings-it was before eight o'clock, when Charley would pa.s.s through, having checked the goose pits, and was telling the Sports to go to bed, since we were rising at four-I would climb the stairs back to my room and lie in bed, reading my Chess Master magazine, and later on would listen to the hunters thumping up to their rooms, laughing and coughing and hocking and clinking gla.s.ses and bottles and using the bathroom and making their private noises and yawning, and boots. .h.i.tting the floor until their doors closed and they'd be snoring. It was then I could hear single men's voices out on the cold main street of Fort Royal, and car doors closing, and a dog barking, and the switchers working the grain cars behind the hotel, and the air brakes of trucks pausing at the traffic light, then their big engines grinding back to life and heading toward Alberta or Regina-two places I knew nothing about. My window was under the eave, and the red Leonard sign tinted the black air in my room, whereas in my shack there had been only moonlight and my candle and the sky full of stars and the glow in Charley's trailer. I lacked a radio now. So to set my mind off toward sleep I inventoried the experiences of the day and the thoughts that had accompanied them. I considered, as always, my parents, and whether it was hard for them to be good in jail, and what they would think about me now, and how I would've conducted myself had I been present at their trial, and what we would've said, and whether I would've told them about Berner, and if I would've said I loved them where others would hear. (I would've.) I also considered the hunters' gruff American voices and the achievements of their children, and their wives waiting at the kitchen door, and all their adventures, none of which caused me envy or resentment. I had no achievements so far, or anyone waiting for me, or even a home I could go back to. I just had my days' duties and my meals and my room with my few possessions. Yet I surprisingly went to sleep almost always relieved to feel the way I did. Mildred had told me I was not to think bad of myself, since what had happened had been through no fault of mine. Florence had told me our lives were pa.s.sed on to us empty and our task was to make up being happy. And my own mother-who'd never been where I was now, and knew nothing about Canada except as a view across a river, and who did not even know the people she'd handed me over to-even she had felt it was better for me to be here than in some juvenile prison in Montana. And she undoubtedly loved me.

Berner had written that our lives were ruined but had far still to go. And I couldn't have made it up that I was truly happy. But I was satisfied not to haul my water in a pail, not to bathe myself using the pump and the hot plate and a bar of soap, not to sleep in the cold, drafty, acrid shack and see no one I knew, and not to share the privy with Charley Quarters. It's possible, I felt, that I was experiencing improvement, which for a time I hadn't believed I ever would. So that it was possible to think-and this was important to me-that at least some part of my human makeup was inclined to believe life could be better.

The only time I'd met Arthur Remlinger and truly had a word with him, he'd asked me-half joking-if I would like to change my name. I'd told him no, as anyone would've-especially me, wanting to cling to who I was and what I knew about myself when those points were in dispute. But in my room under the eave, I felt Arthur Remlinger possibly knew something I hadn't known. Which was: that if anyone's mission in the world was to gain experience, it might be necessary, as I'd already thought, to become someone different-even if I didn't know who, and even if I'd believed, and our mother had taught us, that we were always a faithful version of who we were when we began life. My father, of course, might've said that this first person-the person I'd started to be-had stopped making sense and needed to give way to someone who would do better. He had probably thought that about himself by then. Though for him it was too late.

Chapter 54.

It was following my adjustment to Fort Royal-a town with a genuine life and a consideration for itself-that I moved more into the sphere of Arthur Remlinger, which Florence had indicated to me would occur and I was extremely eager to have happen and couldn't have said why it hadn't happened already. In my weeks of living in Partreau, Arthur Remlinger had seemed like a different person each time I made contact with him-which naturally confused me and made me feel even more alone than I would've otherwise. One time, he would be friendly and enthusiastic, as if he'd been waiting to tell me something-but never did. Another time, he'd be reserved and awkward and seem to want to get away from me. And still other times he was stiff and superior acting-always costumed in his expensive (and what I thought of as) eastern clothes. To me, he was the most inconsistent person I'd ever met in life. Though it made him fascinating, and made me want him to like me, having never been around strange people, except our mother, and having never found anyone precisely interesting before, except Berner, who more than anything else was like me.

Once, on what became one of our automotive outings-after I'd moved into the Leonard and begun to see him more, and during which times Remlinger would navigate his Buick at battering speeds over the b.u.mpy highway, declaring on this and that subject that occupied him (Adlai Stevenson, whom he loathed, the deterioration of our natural rights by the forces of syndicalism, his own acute powers of observation, which, he said, should've permitted him a life as a famous lawyer)-the Buick all at once crested a dusty rise at a speed of almost ninety. And there on the pavement ahead were six colorful pheasants, wandering carelessly out of the grain to peck at gravels and wheat seeds blown off the trucks en route to the elevator in Leader. I expected him to brake or swerve. I'd been holding the sides of my seat already. But both my hands flew to the dashboard, my feet stood up hard on the car floor, my knees locked in antic.i.p.ation of the big Buick drifting or skidding or swerving off into the stubble or taking flight and tumbling whatever distance ninety miles an hour would propel us, after which we'd be dead. But Arthur failed to consider the brakes. Nothing in his features even changed. He drove straight through the pheasants-one struck the winds.h.i.+eld, two catapulted into the air, a fourth and fifth were transformed into feathers on the highway, a sixth was untouched, barely noticing the car pa.s.sing. "You see a lot of those birds out here," he said. He didn't look at the mirror. I was astonished.

Later, when we'd cruised through the small town of Leader, Saskatchewan, and parked and gone inside the Modern Cafe for a sandwich, Arthur fixed me, across the table, with his clear blue eyes, his thin lips together, almost smiling, as if he might be speaking words silently before he said them, but then didn't smile. He was wearing his brown leather jacket with the fur collar-like the bomber jacket my father had brought back from the war-though Remlinger's was nicer. He had his green silk handkerchief tucked in his collar as a napkin. His reading gla.s.ses dangled on their string against his chest. His blond hair was carefully combed. His bony, manicured fingers with thin hairs on top maneuvered his fork and knife as if his food was of the greatest interest to him. There'd been no reason given for why he'd ignored me for these weeks. Now no reason was going to be given, I a.s.sumed, for why he'd stopped. It was just how things were.

"How long have you been here now, Dell?" Arthur Remlinger said and suddenly beamed at me as if I was someone he realized he liked.

"Five weeks," I said.

"And are you enjoying your work? Getting something out of it?" He spoke in his precise way that involved his mouth moving animatedly, as if each word had a s.p.a.ce between itself and the next word, and he enjoyed hearing each one. His voice was unexpectedly nasal coming from such a handsome, refined-seeming man. These were things about him that made him seem old-fas.h.i.+oned, though he wasn't old.

"Yes, sir," I said.

He tried his fork on the surface of the fried pork chop he'd ordered. "Mildred told me you might be a little unsteady." He cut down into a small fatty edge and put that in his mouth, the tines of his fork turned down in a way I hadn't seen anyone eat. He was left-handed-like Berner. "It's perfectly all right if you are," he said. "I'm unsteady myself. And I'm easily led-or I once was. We're all unsteady out here. It's not natural being here. You and I are alike in that."

"I'm not unsteady." I resented Mildred telling him such a thing, and resented her for knowing it. I didn't want to be that way.

"Well." He looked pleased, which suited his fine features. "You've never been alone before, and you've had an unlikable experience."

There were several people in the cafe, farmers and townspeople, and two police officers in heavy brown coats with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, eating at the lunch counter. They noticed us. They knew who Arthur Remlinger was, just as the Mormon woman in the street in Fort Royal had. He was very recognizable.

I wasn't supposed to ask questions but was supposed to wait to be told things. But I wanted to know why he'd driven his car through the pheasants and killed them. It'd been so shocking. My father would never have done that, though I thought Charley Quarters would. It hadn't seemed to linger in Remlinger's mind. "It's not a simple ch.o.r.e to live up here," he said, calmly chewing his fatty meat. "I've never liked it. Canadians are isolated and in-grown. Not enough stimulation." A lock of his blond hair fell across his forehead. He moved it back with his thumb. "The writer Tolstoy-you've heard of him"-I'd seen his name on the book shelf-"he paid for peasants to come out here in the last century. I presume, to get rid of them. Some of those people are still here-their ancestors are, anyway. There was a brief civilization. People put on plays and pageants and light operas. There were debating societies, and famous Irish tenors came from Toronto to sing." His blond eyebrows jumped. He smiled and looked around at the other people in the cafe and at the policemen. There was a murmur of voices and the noise of silverware on plates that he seemed to like. "Now"-he went on cutting and eating and talking-"we're returning to the Bronze Age. Which isn't all bad." He wiped his lips with his silk handkerchief, fixed his gaze on me again, then turned his head at an angle to indicate he had a question. I saw he had a tiny purple birthmark on his neck in the shape of a leaf. "Do you think you have a clear mind, Dell?"

I didn't understand what that meant. Possibly a clear mind was the opposite of unsteady. I wanted to have one. "Yes, sir," I said. I'd ordered a hamburger and had begun to eat it.

He nodded and moved his tongue around behind his lips, then cleared his throat. "Living out here produces a fantasy of great certainty." He smiled again, but the smile slowly faded as he looked at me. "People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades. You're not inclined to do that, I guess. You're not in despair, are you?"

"No, sir." The word made me think of my mother in her jail cell-smiling and helpless. She'd been in despair.

Arthur took a sip of his coffee, holding the cup around its rim-not by its little curved handle-blowing on the surface before he sipped. "That's settled then. Despair's out." He smiled again.

I'd been inside Arthur Remlinger's rooms-seen photographs of him. Seen his books. His chess board. His pistol. He seemed approachable now-a moment when he could be my friend, which was what I'd wanted. I'd never considered asking a person why they were on the earth where they were. It hadn't been a topic in our family, who'd always moved on someone else's authority. But I wanted to know that about him even more than I wanted to know about the pheasants, since he seemed more out of place here than even I was, and since I'd become accommodated in spite of everything. We weren't very much alike, I didn't think.

"Why did you ever come out here if you don't like it?" I asked.

Remlinger sniffed, took his handkerchief out of his collar and pinched his fine nose with it. He cleared his throat the way his sister, Mildred, had. It was their only resemblance. "Well, a better question would be . . ." He turned and looked out the cafe window beside us onto the street where his Buick was parked beside the policemen's Dodge. MODERN had been lettered in reverse on the inside with gold paint. It had begun to snow. Wind pushed a gale of tiny, swarming flakes up the street like fog, swirling a funnel around the cars and trucks that were pa.s.sing, their headlights turned on at noon. Arthur seemed to forget what he wanted to say-the better question. He was flicking his gold ring with his thumbnail. His mind had attached itself to some other thought.

He took a package of cigarettes out of his jacket-Export *A's, the same ones Florence smoked. He lit one and blew smoke against the cold plate gla.s.s, where it swam against the snowy background. He was feeling a need to say something, to be personable and to act as if he was interested in me and my question. Though what could've been more unnatural to him? A fifteen-year-old boy who was completely unknown to him. Possibly it seemed good to him I was American. Possibly he saw himself in me, the way Florence said. But what could it have mattered to a man like him?

The way Remlinger smoked his cigarette-holding it between the fingers of his left hand in a V, his eyes averted-made him look older, his skin less smooth. His profile was more angular than when he looked straight at me. His neck with the birthmark was thinner. Some vacancy had taken over for a moment. The corners of his thin lips flickered upward beside the V. "You're the young son of bank robbers and desperadoes," he said and blew smoke onto the gla.s.s away from me. "You don't want your life just to be about that, and only that, isn't that right?"

"Yes, sir." Berner had said that no one ever believed her about our parents, and she was going to quit believing it herself.

"You want your self to be about other things." He was speaking very precisely again. "More, ideally."

"Yes, sir," I said.

He licked his lips and raised his chin as if something had just changed again in his thinking. "Do you ever read biographies?"

"Yes, sir," I said. Though I'd only read the thumbnail ones in the World Book. Einstein. Gandhi. Madame Curie. I'd made school reports about them. But he meant real biographies, the thick ones on his book shelf I wasn't supposed to know about. Napoleon. U. S. Grant. Marcus Aurelius. I wanted to read those, and someday felt I would.

"My thought is," Remlinger said, "people who hold a lot inside and have to hold a lot inside should be interested in what great generals do. They always understand what fate's about." He seemed pleased and spoke more confidently. "They know plans work out very, very rarely, and failure's the rule. They know what it is to be unimaginably bored. And they know all about death." He stared at me inquisitively across the table. The s.p.a.ce knitted between his eyebrows. He seemed to want this to be the answer to my question about why he was here. He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express. He wasn't going to answer my question now.

Remlinger took his wallet out of his jacket and laid a paper bill on the table top to pay. The bill was red, nothing like American money. He was suddenly eager to go-to get back in the Buick and drive at great speeds over the prairie, hitting whatever he wanted to hit.

"I don't like America much," he said, standing. "We don't hear a lot about it, up here." Two people at the counter looked around at him, tall and blond and handsome and peculiar. One of the policemen also turned and looked. Remlinger didn't notice. "It's strange to be so close to it," he said. "I think that all the time." He meant to America. "A hundred twenty miles. Does it seem very different to you? Up here?"

"No, sir," I said. "It seems the same." It did.

"Well. That's good then," he said. "You've adapted already. I suppose that's why I'm where I am. I've adapted. Though I'd love to travel abroad someday. To Italy. I love maps. Do you like maps?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Well. It's not as if there's a race we have to win, is there?"

"No, sir," I said.

He didn't say more than that. The idea that he would travel abroad seemed strange. As unusual and out of place as he was, he also seemed to belong there. It was still my childish view that people belonged where I found them. We left the cafe. I was never there again.