Journey, p.4
Journey, page 4
Elk come by, says Pa-pe-o.
Blue-flower-berry come by, says Tsling-ta.
Ah-damn not so smart like Evening, that one thinks Blue-flower-berry is animal, maybe.
Dog come by, says A-ma-po.
Raven come by, says Ne-co-tah.
Coyote come by, says Klee-qua.
Snail come by, says E-too.
Squirrel come by, says Qay-tha.
Owl come by, says Ba-tee-po-tah.
Weasel come by, says So-tha-nee-so.
Rabbit come by, says Klaaa-coo.
Flint come by, says So-see-ka.
Fish come by, says Laa-po.
Crayfish come by, says Tling.
Beaver come by, says Khan-yah-da.
Boy, all worn out. All those animals come by. Coyote come by maybe four, maybe eight times. Gets dressed up, fool around.
Says Piisto-pa.
Says Ho-ta-go.
Says Woho-i-kee.
Says Caw-ho-ha.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Tricky one, that coyote. Walks in circles. Sneaky.
That Ah-damn not so smart. Like Harley James, whiteman, those. Evening, she be Indian woman, I guess.
Evening come back. Hey, she says, what are all these coyote tracks come around in a circle. Not so smart, Ah-damn, pretty hungry though. Here, says Evening, mee-so, real juicy. So they do. Ah-damn, that one eat three mee-so. Ah-damn, says Evening, I better get some more mee-so.
Pretty soon that one, god, come by. He is pretty mad. You ate my mee-so, he says.
Don’t be upset, says Evening, that one, first woman. Many more mee-so back there. Calm down, watch some television, she says.
But they are upset and that one says that Evening and Ah-damn better leave that good place, garden, Evening’s garden, go somewhere else. Just like Indian today.
Evening says, okay, many good places around here. Ah-damn, that one wants to stay. But that fellow, god, whiteman I think, he says, you go too, you ate those mee-so, my mee-so.
Ah-damn is unhappy. He cry three times, ho, ho, ho. I only ate one, he says.
No, says that god fellow. I see everything. I see you eat three of my mee-so.
I only ate two, says Ah-damn but pretty quick that one throw him out.
Ha!
Throw him out on his back, right on those rocks. Ouch, ouch, ouch, that one says. Evening, she have to come back and fix him up before he is any good again. Alright.
There is also a Ju-poo-pea, whiteman call him snake. Don’t know what kind. Big white one maybe, I hear, maybe black, something else. I forgot this part. He lives in tree with mee-so. That one try to get friendly with Evening so she stick a mee-so in his mouth, that one. Crawl back into tree. Have trouble talking, hissss, hissss, hissss, hissss. Maybe he is still there. Like that dead-river pig and Billy Frank lose his truck.
So.
Evening and Ah-damn leave. Everybody else leave, too. That tree leave, too. Just god and Ju-poo-pea together.
Ah-damn and Evening come out here. Have a bunch of kids.
So.
That’s all. It is ended.
Boy, my friend says, better get some more tea. One good story, that one, my friend, Napiao says.
Those men push their tape recorders, fix their cameras. All of those ones smile. Nod their head around. Look out window. Shake my hand. Make happy noises. Say goodbyes, see you later. Leave pretty quick.
We watch them go. My friend, Napiao, put the pot on for some tea. I clean up all the coyote tracks on the floor.
Martin West
My Daughter of the Dead Reeds
His daughter was dead, he told me, drowned in the river. Claimed by the tope clay and fouled cattle wire of the Red Deer River basin, she would never surface. Come Monday morning her classroom desk would be empty and a pair of ballet shoes would hang unclaimed in the cupboard and no one would help. How can you turn down a plea like that? How can you say no to a man crying on your front step with his cuffs turned up like he never made it past the third grade?
“You’d better come in.”
“She was wearing a bright-pink sweater and rubber boots.” He came in and there were reeds on his feet and they stuck to my floor. “I told her not to go along the river. But she did anyway. She’s got a set of brass bells around her wrist that tinkle like Christmas toys so we can’t miss her.”
“Where is your wife?”
“She’s retarded.” He threaded the rim of his hat through his hands and tossed it aside. “She’s retarded and she doesn’t understand. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Haven’t you told her?”
“She’s off her meds.”
She was simple, I knew that. I knew a little. She came to a few of my parties. She had problems with the complicated things in life—area codes, traffic circles, and long grocery lists—but I wouldn’t have called her retarded. So I let him in. He sat on the couch. He was cold and he had on a scarlet vest and hip waders from the Salvation Army, but I let him in anyway.
He didn’t like my place much. I am a bachelor. I live alone. I live with the petrified skeletons of ancient Badland creatures that I put together for a hobby and that sort of thing is against his religion. Fossils are popular here. They’re not a bad hobby. They don’t mean you’re derelict or anti-social or have disregard for other people’s beliefs, but he sat between the calcified bones and his eyes flitted from femur to cranium and tried to pretend they didn’t exist.
I handed him a glass of brandy and felt a little bad for it. He’s a religious man who has lost his daughter and all I did was give him liquor. But he rolled down the brandy in one shot and didn’t even wince. Maybe there were things I didn’t know. The more time goes on, the more I realize I do not know, like the production of pins or the evolution of Mesozoic flowers.
“Have you told the police?” I asked.
“Why?”
“So they can help us look for her.”
“They won’t.”
“What do you mean they won’t? That’s their job.”
“She has to be gone twenty-four hours.”
“No. That’s not right. How old is she?”
“She’s seven.” He nodded. He shut his eyes and counted the years. Maybe he was counting something else, too. “No, wait. She’s eight.”
“Eight? Then they don’t wait a whole day to go looking for an eight-year-old who’s missing in the river.”
“They will with her.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “She’s done it before.”
“That is ridiculous. Call them now. I know one of the sergeants.”
“Do you have a phone?”
I didn’t. I do not like things electronic. They are scabied. They are horsehair. They get in the way of the real things in life. Real things are bones. Real things are beasts. Real things are proving the past and rye, and drinking with women late into the night and then having them naked on top of you, braids up and down, growling. People spend all day long on cellphones, Blackberrys, and computers and don’t even know what the insides of their kitchens look like so I don’t bother with them.
“Even we have a phone,” he said.
“Let’s walk down to the station.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“They have all the proper tools for a search. They have ropes. They have maps and infrared. They’ll make it easier.”
“You have lights and ropes,” he said.
That was true enough. Outside, the sun died orange and sent a long shadow across my workbench just to prove his point.
“Besides,” he said. “We’ve been through this before with them. They want to look in the house first. They want photographs. They want to ask my wife questions.”
“So let them.”
“No. She’ll screw things up. There’s always an excuse. They’ll never look in the right places.”
“What are the right places?”
He did not answer. He sat between a spilled glass of wine and a discarded pair of women’s nylons from a weekend party and stared into my vacant living room. There are a few other things you should know about my living room. It is large. It has high ceilings. Only one couch and one chair. No television. Hardwood floors and no carpet. Along with the fossils there are also remnants of gatherings that happened too near in the past to be fossils. Stains. Smudges. Stilettos. A calendar girl with a blue bikini, a singles magazine soaked with merlot, and a leather-bound address book with many names. He stared out across this smear of a house and the stubble on his chin grew dull.
“Why do you do all this?” he said.
“I like to imagine how those creatures used to be. I know, your religion, you don’t believe in evolution.”
“I’m not talking about the fossils,” he said.
And then he put his head in his hands and he howled. He howled so loud his voice went down into my basement and rattled the jars of preserved plums, and the tiny skeleton of a bird encased in formaldehyde trembled, too.
“Don’t make me go out there by myself,” he said. “I know you don’t have children so you can’t understand, but please help me find the only thing I’ve ever loved.”
“All right,” I said and made my way to the workbench where all the tools of the trade were kept. “I’ll help you find her.”
Was this a bad thing? Was this a pernicious thing? Did I say yes because I just wanted to shut him up? Maybe I deferred because his wife was promiscuous. She went to parties, that much I knew. She didn’t connect well at soirees but it was obvious what she wanted. It was obvious what she wasn’t getting at home although I never went there. She would stand there in the corner of a kitchen with a wool skirt hiked up to her knees and a single malt clenched against her ribs. I think her nose was pierced.
We went down to the Red Deer River in the dark. Let me tell you something about the Red Deer River at night. The water is slow and sullen and hides things in the filigreed shadows of cottonwood. It hides alabaster larvae and cardamom condoms; stories of pioneers starving on the banks, of soldiers who went away to distant European wars and never came back. Today, there are stories of automated farming accidents and postmodern suicides because it’s such a melancholy place, the pastel grey Badlands sunk below the prairie with spent drilling rigs and abandoned wheat kings. But sometimes people just kill themselves because economic times are bad or they have nowhere else to go. They could have done it in Calgary or Vancouver, but this is a better place for it.
I had the flashlights attached to our helmets. The kind spelunkers used. You could fall in the river with them and the bulbs would still work. Still find the clutches of ancient Pteranodons and the tangle of teeth in the late-night sediment. I ran my hand across a layer of prehistoric rock that vanished into the water. Lacerated by the glaciers, the ridges coughed up Cretaceous spines and amber wings.
“Forget about those,” he said. “Give me one of those lights and turn them on.”
“Why are we looking here?”
“This is the way she always comes.”
Laid waste in the mud was the axle of a combine, a weasel skull, and what could have been a free-base pipe.
“Isn’t it dangerous this way?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“Then why do you let her do it?”
“Children are like that,” he said. “You tell them not to do something, but they go ahead and do it anyway.”
His face was dirty. He looked like a miner with my headlamp on. His breath came out in a white cloud then hung around in a bundle.
“Maybe we should retrace her steps,” I said. “What school did she come from?”
“School?”
“Yes, what grade school?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How can you not be sure?”
“You bring your dates here, don’t you?” was all he said.
There was a kite hung up in the willow. An orange kite with red poppies and a crepe tail like a child would have. In the dark sky between the branches there were other things, too. Underwear and plastic bags, lottery tickets and soiled rags. Beer boxes and plastic ashtrays, relics from unhappy cupboards. Anything that wasn’t wanted elsewhere wound up here.
Then in the soft mud by some caragana roots he spotted a set of footprints with the chevron pattern still stamped into the silt. The trail came out of the aspen grove and then meandered along the water, left by a small person who was not at all in a hurry.
“Those are hers,” he said. “Those are her boots. I know them. I put them on her this morning. There’s a chunk of heel missing.”
I got down on my knees. The harsh light fell across the track and on the right foot, and sure enough, the back half of the heel was gone, the rubber cracked and ragged. The trail of boot prints wandered through a cluster of reeds and with each step, they changed a little. The toes sharpened, the chevrons became scaly and the heels narrowed into claws. By the irrigation flue, the tracks were clustered in panic like a child hopelessly lost and knowing so and then they entered the river and were gone.
“What do you see?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“A sign that says phosphates must not exceed ten parts per million.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re an expert on tracks. What do they say?”
“These tracks aren’t new. They’re ancient.”
“Stop that. I’m tired of hearing about your non-existent fossils. She’s been taken into the water right here,” he said. He waded into the river and ran back and forth like a dog that couldn’t decide where to cross.
“She hasn’t gone into the water,” I said.
By the mouth of an oxbow pond where the silt lay deep, a coil of barbwire ran from an old cattle fence and was fouled at mid-current. Trapped beneath the surface, a knot of hunchback clothes bobbled up and down and because the fabric was pink, I pulled on the wire. The weight sank back. Not like a fighting fish. Not like a salmon or even the dead pull of a codfish, but a fiction that belonged on the river bottom forever. I remember once, as a boy, I went fishing in our boat with my father and uncle. We were out on the deep saltwater and the rod bent down in an arc. My father and my uncle spent an hour reeling the cargo in and then a bloated dark coil welled up to the surface, and just as the limb touched the stern of the boat, my father said, go inside.
Now my father and uncle are gone and this is a river, not the ocean. But out of the back eddy rose the drowned tangle of soaked wool and rubber boots. The body was small and childish, the limbs knotted in reeds and the blonde hair strewn with petroleum from the very centre of the earth. Mutilated by the cattle wire, the skull had been stretched into a wedge and around the neck there was still a string of brass bells.
My neighbour threw his arms around the carcass and the head lobbed back. The eyes were baby blue, but the beak was triangular and the arms scaly, reptilian wings.
“My Angela,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s still breathing.”
He put his mouth over the beak, exposed the red gums and razor teeth and blew until the meager chest inflated. I grabbed him by the shoulder and struck him in the face.
“Stop it.”
“How can you say that?” There was blood on his lips and on the sand.
“It is not your daughter.”
I cut off the barbed coils with a pair of pliers. The wings flopped apart in an arc of crude oil. Rolled out, the span was six feet. The eye sockets were filled with vitreous humour that had soured in death and the claws on its feet had punctured the rubber boots like ivy grown through concrete.
“We have to bury her,” he said. He kissed the leather jaw and did up the blue buttons on the dress. “We have to bury her and give her something proper.”
“We have to call the museum,” I said.
“Museum? How can you say my daughter belongs in a museum?”
“That is not your daughter.”
“She’s not an animal, she’s not something to be shot with formaldehyde and stuffed in a jar. She’s a human being.”
“All right, we have to call the medical examiner then,” I said.
“No,” he said. “They’ll just take her away. It would be like everything else. They’d just take her away and then I’d never see her again.”
This was long past reason. The dead creature’s eye gazed into the stark splinters of poplar night to a place where there was no family and no dawn.
“We have to take her home,” he said. He had thought this out. “We’ll take her home and we’ll put her there on the kitchen table until it’s time. That’s where all children go. That’s the way it should be. We’ll burn frankincense and pray. Then I’ll find a minister and we’ll have a service. In the churchyard, the steepled one behind the train tracks. You’ll come, won’t you? I want you to come. You’re the only one who will come, no one else will. You’ll have to be with me when I tell my wife. I can’t do it alone. She’ll die. She’ll crumple in grief.”
Then he wrapped his hand around the tiny set of claws that extruded from the wing and squeezed them. Balled inside the fingers was a coil of kite string.
* * *
—
Russell Fairbanks had slipped on the front deck of a Massey Ferguson combine and fell down into the blades. His leg was severed at the knee and his femoral artery was punctured in not one but two places. He was rushed to the hospital and I cannot recall if he lived or if he died because his parents were religious and would not allow a blood transfusion. I remember Lilly Carmine died of frostbite and her parents looked for her everywhere, but someone else found her inside an old latrine. Perhaps they were secular.
I thought about these things as I walked up the steps to his house. My neighbour stayed in the back of the pickup truck with his waterlogged corpse. He kept whispering, “My little fallen fruit,” and there was no chance I’d be wading back through that. There are two ways to rationalize a criminal act. One is to say that it is not criminal, that it is for the greater good. Like a crusade or starting a war. Perhaps keeping a handgun at home. The other is to embrace the criminality and eat your young. I knocked on the door and straightened my collar.
