Canada: A Novel Part 14

Chapter 55.

I can't make what follows next seem reasonable or logical, based on what anyone would believe they knew about the world. However, as Arthur Remlinger said, I was the son of bank robbers and desperadoes, which was his way of reminding me that no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you're willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from-anything at all can follow anything at all.

It was the case that Charley Quarters soon related to me significant a.s.sertions about Arthur Remlinger-about crimes he'd committed and a desperate flight from authority, about his tendency to violent moods and volatile dispositions that served little notice. Charley was dismissive of him, and felt no loyalty to conceal this information. Remlinger was not a man who prized loyalties, he said, or respected much in the world. Knowing the truth about such a person could never be a bad thing for what it might save you from.

It was also the case (I couldn't have formed these words then and knew them only in some uncreated part of myself) that Arthur Remlinger looked on me as he did on everyone-from an inner existence that was only his and bore almost no resemblance to mine. Mine simply wasn't a fact to him. Whereas his existence was the most immediate and paid for-its primary quality being that it embodied an absence, one he was aware of and badly wanted to fill. (It was obvious from the moment you came near him.) He encountered it over and over, to the point that it was, in his view, the central problem of being himself; and was, in mine, what made him compelling and so inconsistent-this unsuccessful striving to fill an absence. What he wanted (I concluded this later, since he wanted something or I wouldn't have been there) was proof-from me or by me-that he'd succeeded in filling his absence. He wanted confirmation he'd done it and deserved not to be punished more for the grave errors he'd committed. When he ignored me those weeks I was in Partreau, trying not to believe I'd be alone forever, it was because he wasn't sure I'd be dependable to give him what he wanted-not until I'd accommodated myself to my own bad circ.u.mstances, put my own tragedies enough behind me to entertain his. He needed me to be his "special son"-though only for a moment, since he knew what bad things were coming to him. He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

I was only fifteen then, and used to believing what people told me-sometimes more than I believed what was in my heart. If I'd been older, if I'd been seventeen and just that much more experienced, if I'd had more than uncreated ideas about the world, I might've known that the feelings I was experiencing-being drawn to Remlinger, allowing my feelings for my parents to go below the waves of my thinking-that these feelings signified bad things coming to me as well. But I was too young and too far outside the boundaries of the little I knew. I'd felt something like these sensations at the time my parents planned and committed their robbery-when we'd cleaned the house, and Berner and I had waited for them to come back, and later when I'd been ready to get on the train to Seattle and forget about high school. But I didn't connect those feelings to my feelings now, or recognize they meant the same thing. I lacked skills for that kind of connecting. Though why do we ever let ourselves be drawn to people no one else would see as good or wholesome, but only as dangerous and unpredictable? I've thought over and over, in the years since then, how purely unfortunate it was to have become enmeshed with Arthur Remlinger so soon after my parents were put in prison. Still, it's something any person needs to do-to recognize the feeling when something around you isn't good, when there are threats-to remember that you've felt this sensation before, and that it means you're out on some empty expanse all by yourself and you're exposed, and caution needs to be exerted.

What I did, of course, instead of exhibiting caution, was let myself be "taken up" by Arthur Remlinger, and by Florence La Blanc, as if being taken up by them was the most natural and logical consequence of my mother sending me away after the calamity of her own bad fortune. It went on for only a brief time. But I entered into it thoroughly, as a child can-since, again, part of me was still a child.

Chapter 56.

In the early days of October, after I was settled into my tiny closet room in the Leonard, I saw a great deal of Arthur Remlinger-as if I'd suddenly become his favorite boy, and he couldn't have enough of me. I still performed the duties I'd been a.s.signed, and enjoyed them. I scouted geese with Charley in the evenings, rose at four and transported the Sports out to the dark wheat fields, situated the decoys, made loose talk with the shooters, then took up my position to gla.s.s the falling geese.

However, when I wasn't occupied with these duties, Arthur Remlinger made a claim for my hours. I was happy about it, since I hadn't connected the feelings I mentioned before and had no caution (or not enough), and had decided I liked him and found him interesting-a man I felt I could emulate at a later time. As Florence had said, he was educated, had good manners, dressed well, was experienced, was an American, and seemed to like me. And as I said, I'd decided my mother had intended I'd be taken up by strangers and had approved of it as a way to start my life in a new direction.

Remlinger instructed me to use his first name and not to call him "sir"-which was new to me. He took me to the chop-suey restaurant and taught me to use chopsticks and drink tea. I caught glimpses of the owner's daughter, but I'd stopped thinking about her or harboring hopes we'd be friends. Other nights I would eat supper in the Leonard dining room with Arthur and Florence. She brought flowers for the table and offered me forward to the other customers as if I was their relation and we had a history together and Arthur was responsible for me. In this sense he did treat me like his son, as if I actually lived in Fort Royal, in the Leonard, and it was an entirely understandable situation that a boy would do that.

On these occasions, Arthur, dressed in one or another of his handsome tweed suits and polished shoes and a bright tie, spoke more about his highly developed skills as an observer, which he believed suited him for many other walks of life than operating a backwater hotel. He said I should enlarge my own capacities so my future would be a.s.sured. He awkwardly produced a small paper notebook with blue-lined pages, which he seemed to have intended for me, and instructed me to keep my thoughts and observations in it, but never to show what I wrote to anyone. If I read it back on a regular basis, he said, I could find out how much was transpiring in the world-"a great deal"-when it might've seemed nothing was. In that way, I could appraise and improve the ongoing course of my life. He did this himself, he said.

During this time, he took me on several more driving expeditions-once to Swift Current to pay a debt, another all the way to Medicine Hat to retrieve Florence when her car had broken down. Another time he drove me bouncing out across the prairie back roads to a clay bluff above the Saskatchewan River, where a hand-pull ferry inched across the stream below. With the heater running in the Buick we watched down the river to where thousands of geese were floating and gabbling on the glistening water and had spread out across the curving banks. White gulls circled in the turbulent air above them. Remlinger's blond hair was always barbered and neatly combed and sheened and impressive, his gla.s.ses dangled around his neck, and he smelled of bay rum. In the car, he smoked and talked about Harvard and what a perfect existence it had been. (I had only a dim idea about Harvard and did not even know it was in Boston.) He talked more about his wish for foreign travel-he was also interested in Ireland and Germany-and sometimes about the four-thousand-mile border to America, which he called "the frontier to the States." The frontier, he said, was not a natural or logical dividing point, and didn't exist in nature, and should be done away with. Instead it was made to represent erroneous distinctions preserved for venal interests. He was a vigilant proponent of all things in life being natural and inherent. He quoted Rousseau-that G.o.d makes all things good, but man had meddled with them and made them evil. He detested what he called "tyrannical government" and churches and all political parties-particularly the Democrats, which had been my father's favorite (and mine) due to his affection for President Roosevelt, who Remlinger called "the man in the chair," or "the crippled man," and who, he believed, had seduced the country and betrayed it to the Jews and the unions. His blue eyes sparkled when he talked on these subjects. They seemed to make him angry, then angrier. He particularly detested the labor unions, which he called "the false messiahs." These were the issues he'd written his articles about in the pamphlets and magazines stored in the cardboard boxes in my shack: The Deciding Factor, The Free Thinkers. I mostly didn't talk when I was with him, only listened, since he asked little or nothing about me-my sister's name once, where I'd been born, again if I planned to attend college, and how I'd accommodated to my new billet. I didn't talk about my parents or say that my mother was Jewish. I suppose in the States today, he would be called a radical or a Libertarian, and would be more familiar than he was then on the prairies of Saskatchewan.

However, none of this talking seemed to make him happy, as if talking and talking was also a burden he was bearing. He talked on and on in his nasal voice with his mouth moving animatedly, his eyes blinking and primarily turned away from me, as if I wasn't there. Sometimes he was enthusiastic, other times angry-which I felt was his way of accommodating himself to the absence he contained. All of which is to say I sympathized with him (in spite of his bad feelings for Jews) and liked the time I spent with him, though I rarely took part or understood much. He was exotic, as exotic as the place where we were. I had never known anyone who was that, just as I'd never been accustomed to think anyone was interesting.

During these days I slept well in my bed and felt optimistic about being in Fort Royal. I had little feeling of belonging and little to take part in outside my duties. But I supplied my own sensation of belonging and normality-because that was (and is) my character. I got my hair cut and paid for it with the Canadian money I made in tips. I bathed in the shared bathtub and could see what I looked like in the mirror when I wanted to. I set up my chess men on the dresser top and plotted strategies I'd employ if Remlinger and I ever played. I felt at home in the Leonard and a.s.sociated with the Sports and the commercial travelers and the oil riggers who stayed after the harvest crews had pa.s.sed on. I casually fraternized with one of the Filipino girls whose name was Betty Arcenault. She teased me and laughed and told me I reminded her of her younger brother, who was small like I was. I said that I had a taller sister living in California. (Again, I mentioned nothing about my parents.) She hoped to go to California in the future, she said, which was why she rode out from Swift Current to be a "hostess" in the Leonard each night. She was sallow and thin and had dyed yellow hair and smoked cigarettes and barely smiled because of her teeth. She was one of the girls I'd opened a door on and found sitting on the side of a shadowy bed, with a boy asleep beside her. I never considered doing anything with her myself, never had a clear enough picture of what I would do. My only experience of that sort had been with Berner, and I didn't remember much about it.

I found I didn't think about Partreau anymore. I rode to it every morning with Charley Quarters and cleaned geese on the cleaning log in the brittle cold outside the Quonset, across from my shack. But it was as if I'd never been inside there, never walked along the streets or stood beyond the caragana rows and stared toward what I believed was south and wondered if I'd see my parents again. Time closes over events if you don't know much about time. And as I said, time meant little to me there.

During these days, Florence La Blanc told me she'd been thinking about a plan for my future. This was at the dining room table, with a white linen tablecloth and folded napkins and silverware she'd brought from Medicine Hat and supplied along with the flowers, to create, she said, an illusion of civilization on the prairie, and because it was Thanksgiving-my first in Canada. If I was in school, as I should be, she said, I'd have the day off. Of course, it didn't feel like Thanksgiving to me, since it was Monday. But Florence had baked a turkey and dressing and had mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie and brought them in her car, and announced we had to celebrate our shared holiday together.

There were few diners by then-a salesman and an occasional couple traveling east. The riggers and the railroaders and the Sports all ate in the bar. Remlinger sat and stared away at the large painting on the dining room wall, a tiny bright overhead light pointing down on it. The painting showed a brown bear wearing a red fez, dancing inside a circle of shouting men. The men's eyes were wild and excited, their mouths agape and red, clamoring, their short arms in the air.

Florence told me, her red cheeks bright, that she'd been thinking on me and my "plight." In her view I should remain in Fort Royal in Arthur's care through the fall. I should learn to groom myself better and gain strength, and take more frequent haircuts. Then, before Christmas I should take the bus to Winnipeg and move in with her son Roland, who had a young wife and whose child had died of polio. She'd already spoken to him about me, and he was agreeable to it. He would put me into the St. Paul's Catholic High School, where few questions would be asked because his wife taught there. If there was a question, she said-smiling at me, her eyes squinted and s.h.i.+ning-they would say I was a refugee whose American parents had abandoned him and gone to prison, and I'd made a courageous journey to Canada on my own, and responsible Canadians were now looking after me because I had no other relatives. Canada officials, she said, would never send me back to Montana; and Montana would never be the wiser or care. In any case, she said, it would only be three years until I was eighteen, and these years would pa.s.s quickly, and then I could choose a life for myself like any other person. We had that to be thankful for. She never for a moment seemed to consider I would reside with either of my parents again. Though it occurred to me that after three years, if either of my parents were to be released I could find them, and they would certainly want me back. I make this all sound unexceptional now, but it was very strange for my future to be talked about this way and to be in this helpless position in life.

Remlinger s.h.i.+fted his blue eyes to me as Florence carried on with her plan. He was wearing a handsome black jacket and a purple ascot and as always looked exceptional in the midst of the other roomers in his hotel. He blinked at me and smiled. His thin lips tightened, the dent appeared in his chin. He looked back at the painting of the bear and the clamoring men, as if something had been measured in me, a determination made, after which he'd gone back to thinking about the natural order of the universe, and how man ruined everything G.o.d had made perfectly. I didn't like being looked at this way. I didn't know what was being measured, or how truthful the measurement could be. This was a part of the sensation I felt, yet had no words for-that something not good was approaching me. I said that I believed Arthur wanted something from me or I wouldn't have been there-more than an audience, or a witness. What he may also have wanted was to transfer a bad feeling onto me, or else to prove, by my existence, that he was in error ever to feel it in the first place.

Florence, however, was happy to go on discussing my future and I was happy to think I would have one. She said I should consider becoming a Canadian, and she would give me a book about it. This would fix everything. Canada was better than America, she said, and everyone knew that-except Americans. Canada had everything America ever had, but no one was mad about it. You could be normal in Canada, and Canada would love to have me. She said Arthur had become a Canadian some years before. (He shook his head, touched his blond hair with his fingers and stayed looking away.) I didn't know this, since Charley had said he was American from Michigan, like me. But it instantly made me feel different about him. Not bad, only different, as if some part of his oddness had lifted off and left him less interesting than when I'd believed he was an American. In a way he seemed less significant. Which may finally be the only real difference between one place on the earth and another: how you think about the people, and the difference it makes to you to think that way.

Chapter 57.

I wrote a letter to my sister, Berner, during these days. I wrote sitting in my tiny room on my bed, with the square window facing the town, using thin blue paper I'd purchased in the drugstore, and a mechanical pencil I'd found in one of the cardboard boxes in Partreau. I wanted it to be commonplace that Berner and I wrote letters to each other across the great s.p.a.ce that separated us, and that where I was at that time wasn't unusual on the grand scale of things.

In my letter I told her that I was in Canada, and even though that might seem a long way away from everything, it wasn't. I had driven to it in a day's time from Great Falls. I told her I was thinking of becoming a Canadian, which would not be a big change. I would soon be going to school in Winnipeg and having a fine new life. I said that people I had met were interesting. (This word looked very strange in my handwriting.) They had given me a job that had real duties and unique aspects-which I liked and had adjusted to well. I was learning things and liked that. I didn't mention our parents, as if I didn't know anything about them, and we could write letters to each other without bringing them in. I also didn't mention Arthur Remlinger or Florence La Blanc because I didn't know how to describe them or their positions in my life. I didn't say I didn't know where Winnipeg was. I didn't mention that Florence had referred to my current life as a "plight." And I didn't mention the strange feelings I had. I was only partially aware of them and thought they would worry her. I told her I loved her and was glad she was happy, and to say h.e.l.lo to Rudy if she saw him in the park. I would come to see her in San Francisco and be her brother again the first time I had the chance and could take the bus from Winnipeg. I signed the letter and folded it up in its blue envelope, made a plan to go to the post office and send it to the address I had in San Francisco. Then I laid the letter on the wooden dresser top, stood and looked out my window onto the town roofs and the earth stretching like an ocean to the horizon. I thought about what a long, long way away Berner was, and how I hadn't written anything of any importance, or personal, or about her. She would have a difficult time knowing about me from what I'd said, which was because my situation was not an easy one to describe and might worry anyone. It was not like being at home and going off to school every day, or taking the train to Seattle. It would be better, I thought, to write from Winnipeg when everything was settled, and I was in St. Paul's School and there would be more to tell that she could take an interest in and be able to understand.

I took the letter and put it in my pillowcase, which I still had from the morning we were all leaving-Berner, our mother, and me. I thought I would read it later, like the comments and observations Remlinger had told me to write in my little blue-lined notebook, so as to know what life had been like when I was living it. I never wrote in that notebook, and when I left Fort Royal I left it behind.

Chapter 58.

Charley Quarters told me that the whole story of Arthur Remlinger would be the strangest one I'd ever hear, but I should hear it because boys my age needed to hear the raw truth (unlike what most people preferred), which would help me set strict limits for myself. Good limits would keep me where I belonged in the world. He'd known the raw truth, he said, but had failed to set his limits well enough. Where he was now, living alone in a debased trailer in Partreau, was because of that. Charley always spoke this way-referring to dark events pertaining to himself that he wouldn't relate in detail, but were understood to be shameful and wretched if a person wanted to be wholesome, which I did. Charley was disreputable and violent and possibly perverted, and I didn't like him, as I've already said. But he had an intelligence. He had boasted to me that he'd tried to be admitted to college but been rejected for being Metis, and for being too smart. I wondered if underneath he hadn't at least at one time been a boy like me, and if possibly some of that good boy survived somewhere-such as in his willingness to instruct me about limits and the raw truth.

We were cleaning geese that had been shot that morning-the big feathered pile of them dumped out on the ground beside the railroad tie we used as our cleaning log, just inside the wide-open, arched door of the Quonset. Some of the geese were still swimming their feet, some had their b.l.o.o.d.y beaks open and working, while we employed our hatchets to strike off their heads and other parts before opening them up with knives and gutting them, then pus.h.i.+ng them through Charley's homemade plucker machine to remove their feathers. It was the day I went into his trailer for the first and only time.

Inside the trailer, I will say, was not like anything I'd ever seen. In some senses it was like my shack for being cramped and airless and rank smelling. But it also contained the entire acc.u.mulation of Charley's life-or as well as I could make out. It was one overheated rectangular room, its windows papered up with cardboard and sealed with masking tape. A black-iron Delmar stove caked with pitch sat in the corner, its chimney pipe cut up through the low ceiling. A filthy blue couch piled with blankets was his bed. There was a terrible jumble of chairs and broken cardboard suitcases, and stacks of dried animal hides Charley was keeping to sell, plus his golfing sticks, a guitar, a small TV that wasn't plugged in, several spilled-open boxes of birdseed the rats had plundered and cans of food heaped in a corner-kernel corn and tinned fish and Co-Op tea and Vienna sausages and tubes of saltines-and dirty plates and utensils, and Charley's cosmetics box and a tiny framed mirror and more of his silver whirligigs, their propellers busted and needing fixing, his kindling box and a table fan, a pickle jar with yellow liquid in it, and a pair of boxing gloves hung on the wall. There was an old refrigerator and a standing chest with its drawers pulled out and veneer scabbing off. On top were the books Charley read. The Red River Rebellion was one. CCF and the Metis and The Life of Louis Riel were two others. There were stacks of loose papers on which were written what I thought were Charley's poems, which I didn't look closely at. There were framed pictures on the wall. Hitler. Stalin. Rocky Marciano. A man walking a tightrope holding a long pole, high above a river. Eleanor Roosevelt. Benito Mussolini with his jaw jutted out, and beside that, Mussolini strung to a lamppost upside down, his s.h.i.+rt fallen off his belly, with his girlfriend strung up beside him. There was a picture of Charley as a boy, bare-chested, bowlegged, set to throw a javelin, and a picture of an elderly woman looking sternly into the camera, then another of Charley in an army uniform wearing a Hitler mustache, with his arm raised in a n.a.z.i salute. I didn't recognize all of these at the time. Though I knew Mussolini because I'd seen old newspaper pictures of him, both alive and dead-things my father had saved from the war.

The stated purpose to my going inside was to bring Charley his curved sharpening stone for his hatchet so he could more easily chop through the goose necks and feet and wings. But I thought he wanted me to see how a life without set limits could look. There was a rotten-egg stink inside, mixed with something sweet and chemical and food related, which were his tanning solvents and also Charley himself-worse inside for being hot and trapped. The smell was almost visible and feel-able-like a wall-even with the trailer's metal door left open and cold wind entering for the two minutes I was inside. I wanted to get away from it. Sometimes I caught a whiff of it on Charley if I came close to him or the air s.h.i.+fted my way. It seemed to come off his greasy clothes and his dyed hair. It was a feature you'd think no one would ever get used to and that I'd steel myself against it. Though it was a feature I did get used to, so that each time I came around Charley, I was aware of myself smelling him, and would keep smelling him, unnoticed, as if there was an attraction to his smell. It ignited in me, and for a while after that, the need to smell the thing I shouldn't, taste the taste I knew would disgust me, open my eyes to things others would avert their gaze from-in other words to forget about limits. These attractions, of course, cease when you get older and have done it enough. But they are part of growing up, like learning a flame will burn you, or that water can be too deep, or that you can fall from a high place and not live to tell about it.

Charley maintained a bad opinion about Arthur Remlinger-though he had always kept it to himself. Nonetheless he told me that Remlinger was a dangerous, deceptive, ruthless, chaotic, shameless individual who a person like me needed to be cautious and even fearful of because he was also intelligent and could be flattering and lead a person to peril, which Charley implied had happened to him, though he as usual didn't specify how. We were working on the goose carca.s.ses. He took his eyes off the railroad tie where we were doing the cleaning and looked out at the empty town of Partreau, as if something had occurred to him about it. He drew a cloud of cigarette smoke down into his lungs, held it, then expelled it in a torrent through his large nostrils. "People" were on their way up here now, he said. "He knows about them. He's trying to plan out his strategy to save himself." He meant Remlinger. I should've noticed his odder than usual behavior, he said. This is what I needed to be cautious about and not get close to, since his odd behavior could result in dire events I wouldn't want any part of and would need to set limits against. It was all ridiculous, he said. But that was how very bad things often came about in the world. (I already knew, of course, from my own life-whether I could've said it or not-that the implausible often became as plausible as the sun coming up.) When Remlinger was a college boy, Charley said, he'd held unpopular views-some of the ones I knew about. He detested the government. He hated political parties. He hated labor unions and the Catholic Church, and other things. He hadn't been liked by his cla.s.smates. He'd written pamphlets for isolationist, war-opposing (some said), pro-German magazines that made his professors suspicious and wish he'd go back home to Michigan. His father-when Arthur was young-had been unjustly fired from his job as a machine operator, and the union had not protected him due to his Adventist pacifist beliefs. This had created a terrible family crisis and left a stain on young Arthur, which resulted in his adopting radical ideas while he was still in high school. His family did not share his views. They'd put their bad luck behind them and moved to a rural setting and begun beet farming. They didn't understand their son-Artie, he was called-good-looking and articulate, intelligent, destined for a successful life as a lawyer or possibly a politician, and who'd gotten into Harvard on his brilliance. (Charley said the word Harvard as if he knew it very well and had been there. Remlinger, he said, had told all of this to him years before.) Each summer Arthur came home from college and was able to find a job in an automobile factory in Detroit, where he would live in a poverty flat while he saved his money to pay his expenses when the school year began again. His family saw little of him during these times, but thought his willingness to work for his college bills was a promising sign for his future.

But during the summer of his third year-it was 1943-when he was working at his good-paying push-broom job at the Chevrolet factory, Arthur fell into an argument with a union steward who oversaw the work and made sure employees were enrolled-including the ones with summer jobs. Heated words were exchanged about Arthur not joining the union. The steward, Arthur said, knew he was the writer of inflammatory antiunion tracts. (The unions paid attention to such things and had ties to Harvard.) The outcome of the dispute was that Arthur was fired and told he should never expect to find work in the city and should move away.

This also brought on another calamity, since losing his job meant Arthur would lack the money to pay his college fees. His family had nothing to give him. He was as good as broke and couldn't pay his rent and was facing the sudden end to his college aspirations. He went to the officials at Harvard and pleaded with them for a scholars.h.i.+p. But because his opinions were known and disapproved of, he was turned away. The doors of Harvard were closed to him, he told Charley, and the remainder of his young life was thrown into turmoil.

An upheaval overtook him at this point. "A mental breakdown," Arthur had called it. He became despondent, alienated from his family, would only occasionally talk to his sister, Mildred, who asked him no questions-including how he was supporting himself. In despair, Arthur had begun to find consolation elsewhere and from other people. Those people were in Chicago and upstate New York, and shared his, by now, even more violent antiunion, antichurch, isolationist views. They considered themselves supporters of the right-to-work philosophy and had been involved in confrontations with unions over many decades. Arthur moved himself out of Detroit and went to live with a family in Elmira, New York, and worked on their dairy farm while he regained his mental stability. These farmers were violent people themselves-inspired by hatreds and resentments for wrongs committed against them by unions and by the government. Arthur became more deeply involved in their ideas. And in not very long he was sharing their resentments and their need for vengeance, and became familiar with many dangerous plots and schemes-in particular one to set a bomb in a union hall back in Detroit, a bomb meant to do no one harm, but to emphasize the right-to-work philosophy as being the right one.

Arthur, still in an agitated state of mind about not being allowed to go back to college, let himself be convinced he should place the bomb-in a trash can behind the union building. He told Charley he should've been in a mental hospital and would've been if his family could have been in touch with him. His sister was a nurse. Only that hadn't happened.

Instead, Arthur drove from Elmira to Detroit, with the dynamite in the trunk of a borrowed car. He delivered the bomb to its intended location, set a crude clock timer, and drove away. But before the bomb could go off-at ten P.M.-the union's vice president, a Mr. Vincent, returned to the union hall to retrieve his hat, which he'd misplaced. As he was going in by the back door, Arthur's bomb exploded, and Mr. Vincent was terribly burned. And in a week's time he died.

A great manhunt immediately began for the bomber, who no one had seen but who was presumed to be a member of violent groups that did all they could to stifle the unions in America.

Arthur was mortified to learn he had killed someone-which he'd never intended to do-and also terrified he'd be caught and thrown in jail. It was believed the criminal was from Detroit, but no one suspected twenty-three-year-old Arthur Remlinger. His name was known by the police, who supported the unions, but he was never mentioned. By the time the search for the bomber was under way, Arthur was already back on the farm in Elmira-and had if not publicly renounced his views (he never would completely), had come to his senses enough to know he was now a hunted criminal whose life was spoiled.

His choices were either to give himself up and take responsibility for what he'd done, and go to jail; or else, he told Charley, to go as far away as he could imagine going-since he wasn't charged with the crime and wasn't suspected-and try to believe no one would ever find him and that he could outlive his crime with the pa.s.sage of time.

Charley looked at me beside him to see if I was listening. I had stopped cleaning geese to pay close attention-the story was so shocking to me. Charley put a new cigarette between his lips. The blood in the white of his left eye s.h.i.+fted and seemed to swim and s.h.i.+ne. He wasn't wearing lipstick-which he didn't do around the Sports. But his pocked cheeks contained evidence of rouge that had been smudged in the goose pits, and his eyes still had black around them. He was wearing a black welder's ap.r.o.n with blood down the front, and he had blood on his arms and hands, and smelled like geese insides. He would've been a shocking sight to anyone. It had been blowing bits of hard snow all around where we were working in the Quonset door. Flakes were dissolving in Charley's hair, making his black hair dye run. My own hands and cheeks were chafed and stinging. Feathers from our cleaning work had blown into the stiff weeds and around Charley's whirligigs. Mrs. Gedins' white dog had arrived to nose into the gut box and lick its sides. We burned its contents in the oil drum each day, then Charley would scatter the feet and wings and heads for the coyotes and magpies he liked to shoot.

Charley raised his thick eyebrows and his fleshy forehead raveled up. "You can hear him talk like that, can't you? You know? His *mental breakdown.' *Mortified.' His *college aspirations.' Up above everything and everybody?" Charley's lips curled distastefully. "'Course that's when he come running up here. Nineteen forty-five. Just when the war got over. He thought-or the people who saw after him and still see after him, thought-that here was the most unreachable place on earth. They've found out that isn't exactly right." Charley's big front teeth came uncovered behind his lips. He jigged his cigarette around in his mouth on the tip of his wide tongue, as if this part pleased him. "He has to face his fate now, eh? The other fate was just his first fate. And 'course, he's scared to death." Charley looked down at a stiffening goose body on the railroad tie in front of him. He raised his new-honed hatchet and smacked it on the goose's neck, then swept the head off onto the ground for the dog.

Efforts were begun by elements among the right-to-work plotters to find a place for Arthur to hide. No one was looking for him. But Arthur thought they eventually would be and couldn't face the chance of being found. The interests also didn't feel he'd hold up well, that he was erratic and a threat, and could bring everyone down. Arthur had admitted he didn't know why someone hadn't killed him right then and buried him on the farm in Elmira. "Which I would've done and not thought about it," Charley said.

Instead, Arthur told him, the owner of the Leonard, a small, devious, turbulent man named Herschel Box, who Charley had worked for as a boy, was approached to hide Arthur away in Saskatchewan. Box was an Austrian immigrant, an older man, who shared the dangerous inclinations of the Elmira and Chicago plotters and had volunteered for many disruptive a.s.signments below the border-a house burning in Spokane where a person had been maimed, a ransacking, a beating. Box agreed to take Remlinger because he had a German name, and because Arthur had attended Harvard and Box considered him intelligent.

Arthur rode the train from Ottawa to Regina in the fall of 1945 and was picked up by Box and driven out to the little shack in Partreau-there were still people living in town, just the way he'd told me-and there he'd begun a new life in Canada.

Arthur had worked the way I worked, riding a bicycle to town, swamping and running errands for the Sports who Box put up in the hotel and charged fees for shooting. However, he didn't go in the goose fields or clean birds or dig pits the way I did. Box believed he wasn't strong enough for rough activity and made him be the room clerk and later the auditor and the night manager, until Box moved away back to Halifax, where he had a daughter and an abandoned wife. Arthur was left the run of the Leonard alone. He told Charley he remitted receipts to Box every week for three years, until Box died and surprisingly willed the Leonard to him, who he'd become fond of, wanted to protect, and had treated like a son. "Not a usual son," Charley said. "Not one I'd want."

Arthur, however, was never satisfied to be where he was-living in Box's cramped rooms overlooking the prairie, with Box's green parrot, Samson, occupying a perch in the sitting room, and completely cut off from any life he'd been familiar with, longing to go back to Harvard, constantly fearing strangers were coming to punish him for his "irreparable act" and his "views." His views were just dreamed up, he said, along with his writings, to make himself stand out to his teachers. He felt he should've been able to outlive all that and go on to be a lawyer. "A man had gotten blown to smithereens over it, of course," Charley said. But that didn't seem to matter.

Charley said Arthur had begun to experience dark angers and to suffer depressions about his life unfairly becoming about only one thing-his short career as a murderer; and that there was more to him than that, but no way to change anything or make it good. He'd matured since those early days, he felt. But his maturity wasn't being allowed to matter. It would've been better, Charley said, if he'd been arrested and taken to jail and paid his price, and could be free now and living in America where he belonged, instead of marooned in a wasted little prairie town where people were suspicious of him and disliked him as an "oddment" (Charley's word, the same as our father's). The townspeople pa.s.sed rumors back and forth that he was an eccentric millionaire, or a h.o.m.os.e.xual, or an outcast who disappeared into America to do someone's bidding (which wasn't true); or that foreign interests protected him (which was), or that he was a criminal taking refuge from a mysterious crime. ("Rumors all have some basis, okay?" Charley said.) Though, n.o.body in Fort Royal cared enough to follow through to the truth. Rumor was better. The town had never accepted old Box-because he offered up lewd young Indian girls, and gambling went on, and noisy drinking, and farm husbands went to the hotel secretly and caroused, and strangers came and went in the night. But they tolerated it because they didn't want a fuss, and because a town like Fort Royal liked to ignore what it didn't approve. Once Box left back to the Maritimes, which n.o.body understood was part of Canada, Charley said ("n.o.body ever went there"), the town followed suit and tolerated Arthur, who wanted no part of the town to begin with.

Still he felt "ossified," Charley said Arthur told him-a word I didn't know and that made Charley smirk-"vexed and unaccepted" by people he never wanted acceptance from. It made him hate himself and feel desolate and helpless-and fierce regret-that he'd been so young and so panicked back in 1945 as to come all the way out here, and now be completely changed but unable to leave due to the "ossifying" fear of being caught. Going back and facing justice would be too much, Arthur said. He didn't understand how he could do that, the way he didn't understand why he couldn't go back to college-his ticket to propriety his professors had seen their chance to dispossess him of. He was a misfit everywhere and longed to go even farther away. (The "foreign travel" he'd mentioned to me. Italy. Germany. Ireland.) He was almost thirty-nine, though he looked ten years younger with his fine blond hair and unlined skin and clear eyes and good looks. It was as if time had stopped for him, and he'd ceased aging and become only one thing: Arthur Remlinger, in a perpetual present. He told Charley he'd often considered suicide and was a victim of seething night-rages, a chaos-mind that flamed up with no warning (the pheasants he'd bashed through) and that belied his true nature. He'd begun to dress himself up (which he'd never done when he was young), buying dandyish suits from a shop in Boston and having them sent out-giving them to Florence to tailor and mend and launder in Medicine Hat. He sometimes, Charley said-though I'd never observed this-referred to himself as an attorney (as "counselor"), and other times as an important writer. Charley said Arthur influenced everything around him (never positively), but wasn't a person who left an impression. Which is what I realized I had experienced as inconsistency. He knew this, and suffered by knowing it and wished to change everything, but couldn't.

Charley said he himself would've left long ago and never set eyes on Remlinger again, except that the old devil-kraut, Box, had left Arthur aware of some private knowledge about Charley-things from his past that (like Arthur, like my parents and myself) he couldn't stand to have revealed. Charley said he was "indentured" as long as Remlinger wished him to be-as servant, employee, forced confidant, joke b.u.t.t, factotum and secret antagonist. It had been fifteen years-the same number of years I'd been alive.

"He's getting his hands on you now, I can tell," Charley said. He'd gathered up a pile of naked, pucker-skinned geese carca.s.ses and begun carrying them back into the shadowy Quonset. "He has a purpose for you in his survival strategy. Unless I'm wrong. And I'm not wrong."

His freezer box sat among his stretched, drying animal skins and cans of salts and piles of decoys to be repaired, and his motorcycle and digging implements, and where it smelled like the solvents and tanning chemicals.

"I don't admire him," I said, bringing the geese I'd cleaned and feathered-out myself, to drop in the freezer with his. Though I had almost admired him.

"A person who wants his well-deserved punishment to be over with is a desperate man," Charley said, his wide back to me, so I could see the s.h.i.+ne of his barrette in the shadows. "You don't know that," he said gruffly. "You know less than anything."

It was densely cold where we were in Charley's Quonset, everything stiff and painful to touch. "What should I know?" I asked. "What use would he have for me?"

Charley Quarters turned, his arms full of gray featherless geese bodies, and smiled the heartless way he had the first night we'd been in the truck on the dark road north of Maple Creek, when he'd grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and I wanted to jump out and run away. "I told you. Men are coming up here right now. He understands his situation. He understands himself better than I understand him. But he's weak. I don't blame him." Charley pushed up the heavy freeze-box lid with his elbow. Down inside were whitely frozen geese, hard as ingots. He dropped his armload, thumping on top of the others, and stepped back. I did the same and turned quickly toward the lighted Quonset door. I didn't like being alone and close to him. I didn't know what he might suddenly do.

The men-two of them, Charley said, as he drove me back into Fort Royal in the truck-were from Detroit, in America, the scene of Remlinger's crime, fifteen years previous. Arthur had informed him about them late in the summer, when the interests that were in touch told him to prepare himself. (They still considered him erratic, Arthur admitted.) The police case had long ago been given up. But there were people who stayed aware of it and kept their eyes and ears open. And unexpectedly Arthur Remlinger's name had become audible. "A fluke, pure and simple," Arthur said. There was no suspicion to link him to the crime or to think he might be a person to officially talk to. It would need to be a private matter. The murdered man's family and the union a.s.sociates had all gotten old and had never believed Arthur was capable of murder in the first place. But when it was found out where he was-a tiny, faraway Saskatchewan town, living alone and unexplained in a hotel-and that he'd had a.s.sociations with the old dead Herschel Box, a name known in their circles, then things were put together with other things known about him (the row with the union steward years before, the pamphlets, being a troublemaker at Harvard), and it began to seem plausible this Remlinger, an American who'd oddly become Canadian, might be a person to go see in the flesh. If someone could see him when he didn't know he was being seen-enter his life unnoticed-then his likelihood to be a criminal could be judged. After which-a.s.suming he was considered guilty, or at least an accomplice-discussions could begin over what to do about him. "He must've thought I lived and breathed his f.u.c.ked-up life," Charley said, driving.

Arthur said it was felt he had nothing to feel concerned about-two men sent to look at him. He should do nothing outside the ordinary-run away or admit anything, or act in an incriminating manner that would give these men reason to suspect he did blow up the union hall. (Which he had done, Charley said, "because n.o.body would make that up.") It was thought that the two men who were on their way-driving across the middle west in a black Chrysler New Yorker, turning north and across the border to Canada-were without much dedication to their mission. Their names were known. Crosley-the young son-in-law of the murdered Vincent; and an older, retired officer, Jepps-not a family member but brought along to maintain sound sense. These two had little thought Remlinger was the man they were looking for. They were making the trip all the way to Saskatchewan as much as an adventure as a manhunt. They might do some goose shooting if it could be arranged and all else failed. Neither had they given much practical consideration to what they might do if Arthur Remlinger turned out to be the criminal, and they were faced with him-in a foreign country where they knew nothing but the language, and were forced to do something: demand he come back to Detroit (and do what?); go all the way back themselves and convince the police to be interested again (on what evidence?); kidnap Arthur, a full Canadian citizen, and transport him across an international border. (How, and then do what with him? Shoot him? They had pistols; this was known-which became their fatal mistake.) These were average, uncomplicated working men-more like the Sports who congregated in the bar at night than men driven by justice or vengeance. Likely, Remlinger was told, they were already thinking about arriving at the Leonard, seeing nothing was out of the ordinary about him (even though there was), and turning the Chrysler back toward Detroit. Two thousand miles.

The problem was, Charley said-which was why I needed to be careful and would be an idiot not to be-Arthur had turned bitter and moody and sinister feeling and even more chaos-minded at the idea of strangers showing up and knowing who he was and what he'd done, and having the intention to haul him back across the border to face everything he'd failed at. His father was still alive. His future was squandered. His past bad judgments were waiting. Arthur did not possess a calm state of mind, Charley said. He lacked the mental ability not to incriminate himself. Incrimination had become his whole life. These were the changes to his behavior that should've been apparent to me, but weren't.

He'd been up here all the years, Charley said, expecting someone to come and find him-suffering and waiting. A life lived in a wind-deviled, empty-vista'd town-alienated, remote, family-less; only Box, then Charley, then Florence, as companions. And now me. How had he been able to stay? I wondered this later on. The towering weather, the endless calendar, the featureless days, the unfamiliar made permanent. Impossible, any person would think. It was the "better question" Remlinger hadn't answered when we were in the Modern Cafe. He'd adapted, as he told me.

But it had turned him the way he was. Eccentric. Impatient. Regretful. Slightly deranged. Violent with frustration. Living a fragment of a life he couldn't give up. (He would've given it up if he'd had the nerve or the imagination to travel to an even more foreign place where he could again hide.) Charley, by way of dismissing him, said Arthur still saw himself as the smart, naive young student who'd never meant to kill anybody, and who'd suffered because he had-by accident and stupidity-but who wanted his punishment to be over, since his punishment had become his life.

"You," Charley said. We were pa.s.sing the Fort Royal town limits sign, the low buildings, plus the Leonard-an enlarging dot on the prairie-the dusty main street uncongested now that the cold had started (pickup trucks left idling at the curb, the flags at the post office and the bank rattling in the wind, bundled Fort Royal residents keeping nearer the sides of buildings than the street). "You can't blab any of this. Not to A.R. And not to Flo. I'll skin you out raw." What he'd told me (he said again) was a warning so I would set my limits and "protect" myself from what happened if "certain events" worked out different from how they were supposed to. Charley had obviously given thought to these events but didn't describe them, so I didn't try to imagine them.

What I was thinking though, as we drove down Main Street, was about the two Americans on their way out from Detroit. My father said that in Detroit everyone had a good-paying job and security. It was the American melting pot. The power center. Coat of many colors. It draws the whole world to itself, he said. "Detroit makes, the world takes." Etc. These men driving out were from there and were coming to find out true things and champion them. I had never been in Detroit, but I had an interest in it from being born in Oscoda, not so far north of there. A person can have these views and ideas, but have no real experience with them whatsoever.

"Why would I be involved?" I said. I'd become bolder by then and had gotten over being shocked. We were pulling to a stop at the Leonard's small front door, over which LOBBY was painted in black. Wind buffeted the truck windows. I stared at Charley's peculiar, k.n.o.bby, still-rouged profile. A dwarf's face, but a larger, strenuous body.

"If you're lucky, you won't be," he said. His big meaty lips made a hard pooched-out shape, like a kiss, that meant he was thinking. "If you were smart, you'd take the money you've been h.o.a.rding and get on the bus. Get off someplace near the border and slip across and never let yourself be seen again. If you stay here, you're just a point of reference for him, part of his strategy. He doesn't care a nickel what happens to you. He's just trying to prove something."

"They'd catch me and send me back to the juvenile home," I said.

"I'd have done better in the home," Charley said. "You always think you know the worst thing. But it's never the very worst thing."

He meant I'd do better to go back to Great Falls, walk into the police station and admit I was the missing Dell Parsons, and let it all focus down on me: be put in a locked room with bars for windows, staring through at a frozen landscape waiting for nothing to happen until I was eighteen. That had seemed like the worst to my mother. It still seemed the worst to me. I didn't have an answer back to Charley. I almost never did. He only knew about himself. But I knew, for me, what was worst-no matter what happened with Arthur Remlinger. And no matter what happened to me as a point of reference, which I understood to mean that I would just be part of a whim, and be forgotten when it was over.

Charley didn't want me to say anything else. He didn't listen to me more than he had to. I climbed out of his old truck onto the gritty, windy Fort Royal street and closed his door. "Most losers are self-made men," he said as it shut. "Don't forget that." I didn't say anything. He drove away, then, leaving me there to my future.

Chapter 59.

I was in the little lobby of the Leonard-the same afternoon Charley had told me about Remlinger earlier in the morning-when the two Americans arrived. The Leonard didn't have a legitimate lobby-just a square, dim entry room at the bottom of the center stairs, where a front desk was set up with a bell and a lamp and a row of key hooks on the wall. I'd eaten lunch and was on my way to go to sleep. I'd been up at four and would have to scout geese in the evening. Charley had made me think the Americans would be arriving soon, and I had it in mind to see them, had pictured what they'd look like, and had tried to pa.s.s through the lobby as often as possible. But I hadn't thought they'd be arriving that day.

They were registering in with Mrs. Gedins, who'd been doing her kitchen duties and heard the bell. She barely spoke to the men. Though when each of them p.r.o.nounced his name-Raymond Jepps, Louis Crosley-she looked up from the registry book, her swimming Swedish eyes stern and distrusting, as if there was something untruthful about Americans and no one could fool her.

They each had a leather suitcase. And since I was sometimes required to take the Sports' luggage to their rooms, for which I'd be given a quarter, I stood by the wall with the picture of Queen Elizabeth on it and waited. Mrs. Gedins told them the two of them would be sleeping in the Overflow House (my shack), because the hotel was full. (It wasn't.) She'd arrange for Charley to take them when they were ready. This was the first indication that what Charley had told me was correct: that the two men had come from the States, that they'd been identified and were expected. I'd halfway believed the story was untrue-something Charley had cooked up for his own fantastical reasons to frighten me. But the two Americans announced names they'd been predicted to have-Jepps and Crosley. They said they were from "The motor city"-in the States. They were in good spirits and made no effort to disguise who they were. They seemed to have no idea anyone would recognize them or know why they were in Fort Royal. It's possible even Mrs. Gedins knew who they were, so that everyone knew, except the Americans themselves.

"We're going out to the west coast of Canada," Jepps, the older one, the former policeman, said with a smile. He was red-faced and wore a toupee made of some slick black hair material that sat up on his round head and looked not the least natural. It imparted an air of foolishness to him, because he was short and round and wore his trousers pulled up over his belly, and had on brown wing-tip shoes that looked as big as a clown's. He didn't say what they intended to do on the west coast of Canada. Crosley was younger and well groomed, with precise, sharpened features and short, black, barbered hair. He smiled a lot also; but his eyes were alert to here and there, and he was darker complexioned. He wore a gold ring on his little finger that he twisted at nervously, as if he was putting on being jovial. Later, when Jepps had been shot and was dead on the floor of my shack and I was terrified but nonetheless involved in moving him, I had to pick up his toupee, which was an awful thing to do. (It had come loose from his head when he was shot.) I hadn't seen a toupee before, but recognized it. I was surprised at how flimsy it was, and small. It ended up in the burn drum, with the goose entrails and feathers.

Crosley asked Mrs. Gedins if there was food they could eat; they hadn't eaten since breakfast, in Estavan. Mrs. Gedins frowned and said lunch (which she called "dinner") was finished long ago (it was almost three) but the Chinaman would fix them something down the street. I could show them where it was-which alerted them to my presence. They said Fort Royal wasn't such a big place ("burg," Jepps called it in a nasal voice that was like Remlinger's). They could find the only Chinese "eatery" in town. In Detroit there was a whole Chinaman town, they said. They often went there with their wives. They were eager to compare Canadian Chinese to their Michigan variety.

They asked to leave their suitcases in the lobby and wondered to Mrs. Gedins if there was any goose shooting to be done. On their drive up they said they'd seen thousands of geese in the air and occasionally one had fallen out of the sky, obviously shot dead from the ground. They had their shotguns, Crosley said, but seemed tentative about that. Possibly they might arrange for some shooting in the next two days. They wanted to see the sights, take the rides-as if visitors came to Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in the bl.u.s.tery cold of early October to enjoy its attractions. This wasn't a believable thing to say and made them seem even more to be who Charley said they were.

Mrs. Gedins told them they would need to talk to "Mr. Remlinger," who owned the hotel and did the organizing for the shooting. He would be available in the dining room and in the bar tonight. There were other hunters in the hotel, she said. There would probably not be places unless someone woke up drunk or sick.

Standing behind them in the shadowy lobby I was alert to their reactions to Mrs. Gedins speaking "Mr. Remlinger's" name. It was Mr. Remlinger they'd traveled two thousand miles to observe-to conclude if he was a murderer and decide what they should do about it if he was. By what means they'd conclude this, I couldn't fathom, since Remlinger, as Charley said, would never admit to the act, and almost no one still alive knew about it. I'd already wondered that day: what would a murderer look like? Once you committed one-no matter if you intended to or didn't-did you forever have the act written on your face? Did Jepps and Crosley a.s.sume it would be simple to detect? And did you have "murderer" written on your face before you committed the crime? I'd seen pictures of murderers-again, in old movie-house newsreels. My father was fascinated by them and their adventures. Alvin Karpis and Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow himself, and John Dillinger. They'd all looked like murderers to me. Though they'd already committed their murders by then, so there was no doubt. Plus, they were dead. Shot to death, many of them, and laid out for their pictures. My parents, I'd decided, could've been recognizable as bank robbers long before my father entered a bank and robbed it. My sister and I would've been the only ones not to know it.

But the sound of Remlinger's name, uttered in the quiet of the overheated Leonard lobby, excited no change in either Jepps' or Crosley's facial expressions. As if that name meant nothing. "Possibly," Jepps said-his fat thumbs hiked his trousers up over his belly lump-"you could ask this Mr. Remlinger to speak to my friend and me. We'd like to shoot some geese if it can be arranged. We'll come in the bar tonight. Tell him just to introduce himself. We're friendly Americans." They both laughed at this-though Mrs. Gedins didn't.

The Americans walked off together down the windy little main street to find the Chinaman's. But I hurried around to the back of the Leonard to see if a black Chrysler New Yorker was there, bearing a Michigan license plate. If they had asked me to have a meal with them, I would've gone for sure, though I'd already eaten. It seemed adventurous to get to be near them and know who they were, but for them to have no idea I knew. As if I was the one disguised. This excited me. I could've found out things about them, their plans, for instance-although I'd been forbidden to speak about this and didn't, in fact, know what I'd be able to say or to whom. Anyone can see how a fifteen-year-old boy would be attracted to such possibilities.

The two Americans, however, barely noticed me and walked straightaway down the street toward the red WU-LU sign. I stepped outside to watch them. Jepps put his short arm around the shoulder of the younger man and immediately began talking seriously. "This is the way we want it," I thought I heard Jepps say, his nasal voice catching up in the cold breeze. "Okay, I know. I know," Crosley said. "But. . . ." I didn't hear the rest, though I thought I knew what they were talking about. And I was right.