THOSE SUMMER days very highly on the prowl we used to target two or three towns where no one knew us and Perry might make the right sort of impression on a certain sort of girl, beginning by pulling up and asking directions to a “fine restaurant,” a ploy that despite its lameness actually worked once so we didn’t give it up. The vicarious buzz that afternoon ended for me when the two of them dropped me at the Antelope Room in Goose Lake and disappeared for five hours, by which time I was regarded as both a regular and a local. Later, Perry said he’d seen her farmhouse and they’d had a “nice” time watching tv—turned out we’d both seen the same episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Gilligan’s Island,” he while eating potato chips, me while railing at the bartender about cultural imperialism—and I must have looked disappointed because Perry was quick to add, “we kissed a little.” I wouldn’t tell him so, but I was happy nothing else had developed. It seemed important that his sexual adventures on those jaunts never moved beyond early pubescence. Little kissing, and pain control all around. Other days we’d more adventurously play a bar scam, which at least held the real danger of violence. I’d enter first and start a tab with the bartender, telling him I’d just had my car stereo ripped off by a hitch-hiker while the two of us were stopped for gas and I’d gone to the men’s. After I’d had time to down a couple of beers, Perry would come in and sit somewhere behind me at a table. I’d get a glimpse of him and tell the bartender, Speak of the devil, and so on, and ask him to keep an eye on the kid while I went outside to see who he was travelling with and find the knapsack where he’d stashed the goods. Five minutes later, after Perry had sampled the bar snacks, he’d get up with an audible profanity and run out into the street, where I’d be waiting in the getaway truck. This all for fun rather than small profit.
We took overnight trips to Swift Current, just ninety miles distant, and a day trip on a whim to Regina, five hours each way and a football game in between. Marcie complained about my “disappearances” and assumed I was up to particular and unmentionable no good. She said, “Small town women might learn to tolerate this sort of crap but I’m not from here and I don’t believe in long-suffering if you can do something to stop it.” My inability to defend myself is partly attributable to the very real guilt I felt at playing the role of the wild one when I’d put so much time into rehearsing the lines of upstanding characters. It was certainly no defence that Cora had mentioned Perry’s aimlessness and wondered if maybe I couldn’t do something to make him a more directed person. I liked to think that Perry didn’t need me. He’d done well to shake off the stigma of “mild retardation” his Grade 4 teacher had tagged him with. (Though he was never diagnosed, it’s obvious now that he has a learning disability that interferes with his visual language processes, and that his Grade 4 teacher was an insensate poodleturd.) That I might have needed Perry didn’t occur to me until I started to come around after the breakup and read one night about the “sympathetic lockjaw” Thoreau claimed to have suffered after his brother’s death of tetanus. The summer of our misbehaviours was the same one I learned that Eugene had died and around the time Marcie announced that she didn’t want to have children because they would anchor her and she still had hopes that we could be a cosmopolitan and option-positive couple. She actually used the term “option-positive.” In discussions of our future her language invariably sprouted the ugliest of jargon. I opted for time alone on the island, listening to the river, and in the truck with Perry, listening to ourselves sing radio songs.
After Marcie and I bottomed out, Perry stayed clear of me and the two of us put an end even to reminiscing about our rambling ways of a few years ago. When school restarted I resumed my adulthood. We haven’t spent much wayward time together since those days, but Cora thinks he’s developed a streak of recklessness since our glory summer and, whenever she can, lays the evidence at my feet. When I might have served as a father figure, I instead acted like a brother on shore leave. We are all of us self-tending artifacts, forever reconstructing ourselves and never getting it quite right before we’re again fractured. It’s painstaking work.
Three summers ago I built some winterproof boxes and wired speakers from Cora’s front room out to the back patio. That same year, Perry secured his present reputation by repeatedly bombing the town with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while his mom was at work. The speakers have been off limits to him ever since, so it’s with some curiosity that I come around the house to the wailings of Bob Marley. Perry’s on his haunches, working on the hose attachment of the barbecue’s propane tank. Tonight we eat eye of round, my favourite cut.
“Tell me it works,” I say.
He starts, turns his head and falls on his ass. “Christ! You scared me shitless. Don’t sneak up like that.”
“You don’t talk like that around your mom, do you?”
“She’s still at work. I’m trying to fix this before she comes home. Otherwise it’s the hibachi.”
“Don’t say that.”
“And it gets worse. We don’t have a stand for the hibachi and I’ll bet anything Mom won’t let me prop it on this grill. She’s always paranoid the house will catch fire.”
“So we have to barbecue on the ground? Like animals?”
“Unless we make this hose attach.”
“You do it. I’m the cook.” I play a hunch. “Oh yeah, you said there were three sticks of dynamite?”
“I think so. It was Matthew’s show, I was pretty drunk.” Perry contradicts himself so frequently I can’t believe he’s lying, but his revision has suddenly revealed the possibility that Hall really does have evidence, and all that saves me from cuffing my cousin is that I’m trying to get in the habit of keeping the peace, just the way Hall wants.
“You better call Matthew and find out. Right now.”
We go inside, where he makes the call and I turn down the stereo. Roving among a scattering of cassettes laid on the cabinet my eye catches something called “Tranquil Dawn,” no doubt one of those nature-sound recordings, the popularity of which I’ve never understood, especially among non-urbanites. Marcie had an album of marsh noise. It skipped on the cricket sounds. Likely attracted snakes.
To the kitchen to check out supplies. I see someone has already loaded the chef’s tray with seasonings, sauces and implements that serve no real purpose but that I like to use anyway. Behind the tray, on the counter, are bottles of vitamins and a yellow pill-sorting box of the kind people use to keep their medications straight. I’ve never seen it before. It’s full of pills. I get a can of apple juice from the fridge, well stocked with beer for Perry and me. Something about twist-off caps makes me uneasy. I take a beer outside for Perry, who’s back at work on the hose. He says that Matthew swears there was just one stick but he thinks Matthew would lie to keep him happy so Perry won’t get angry and tell Matthew’s dad, who’d hit Matthew pretty hard if he knew.
So nothing’s resolved. I play another hunch.
“Is your mom sick?” He’s got the hose on and is checking the pilot.
“Everything’s negative.”
“What’s negative?”
He begins to turn around but stops and looks back into the grill. “Ah shit. Why did you ask?”
“What’s negative? Did she have tests?”
“I didn’t say anything.” He drums his fingers on the hood. “Yes she did but they were negative. She had a procedure done but it turned out to be minor. It would have to be minor, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t call it a ‘procedure.’ ”
“When?”
“She had it a couple of weeks ago. We got the results Friday.”
“Did she tell anyone?”
“I don’t know. I guess not.”
“I guess not.”
He takes the beer and sits in a patio chair. “She’s more or less all right. Do me a favour and don’t tell her I told you.”
“Will you be in trouble?”
“A good chance.”
“Fine. I owe you some trouble.”
“Are you really mad?”
“Hopping so, just hopping. Let’s say you owe me three favours.”
“I thought there’d be something like this.”
The music stops. The best way to get news out of Perry is to keep moving and strike from odd directions. “What exactly is wrong with her?”
“Plumbing.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Not so much the pipes as the faucet.”
“… Uterus?”
“Yeah.”
When Cora comes home, I’m wrapping the potatoes in foil and Perry’s asking me for reasons not to dangle Dewey from the water tower “if he thinks we’re so stupid.” Cora moves through the house in some ritual pattern almost but not entirely stripped of inefficiency, leaving small repetitions, disappearing to change her clothes and then again to change her shoes, putting away what she’s brought home and adjusting the windows to the late afternoon, all the while a part of the conversation, whether with words or with the soft vocalizations that attend each task.
“Millie Frank at the Co-op says he’s a pathological liar,” she says. “Some people say that about Millie, though. I wish everyone would just mind their own business.”
“I guess the stories themselves aren’t so bad—”
“They’re warped, Perry,” she says. “They’re sick and unchristian.”
“But people don’t know whether he wants them to laugh or believe him. And everyone knows Toss is a friend of his and then Toss starts getting accused.”
“What have I been accused of?”
“I don’t know, that you’re in on something, trying to get up people’s ass.”
Cora turns and glares at him.
“What’s my motive?”
“Oh, that’s enough. Wesley, tell your friend he’d better keep quiet for a while. Get him a girlfriend or a good book to read or something.”
“I don’t know if he reads. He’s an idiot for movies.” My hand accidentally brushes a potato and sends it rolling off the counter and onto the floor. I stoop awkwardly to pick it up, trying not to engage the muscles on the left side of my back. When I finally get hold of it I let out an audible sigh.
“What’s the matter with you?” Cora asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’d have told you if something was wrong.” I regret these last words as soon as I’ve said them, and so does Perry, who’s avoiding his mother’s accusatory glance and no doubt looking for an escape from behind the kitchen table where he’s unthinkingly trapped himself. “I fell off a cliff.”
“What were you doing?” asks Perry to advance the conversation.
“The moon was full. I was hunting cattle.”
Cora ignores this. “Have you been to a doctor?”
“Maybe he needs a vet,” Perry says.
“I think I tore a muscle. I’ll just let it heal.”
“Did you at least find a medicine wheel or something?” Cora knows about my searches and has told me she thinks the Indian grave was Eugene’s invention.
“I’ve found a few things lately.” I take the Polaroid shot from my shirt pocket and hand it to her. “What does that look like to you?”
She holds it at arm’s length and peers.
“How about Dutch elm disease?”
Perry takes it from her. “It’s a cave drawing.”
I tell them about the winter count and the other artifacts, and where I found them. “This is just between us, of course.”
“What gave you the idea to go in there in the first place?” asks Cora.
“Curiosity. I guess you’d call it perverse curiosity.” She won’t nod for me. She flatly disapproves. By now she must have heard about my strangely long-delayed act of reckless jealousy. “Anyway, I’m hoping to find a way of verifying the authenticity of the stuff, and the calendar in particular, but I’m going to have to do it myself. If I can find a corresponding event for each of those symbols, maybe I can figure out the years they represent and then the tribe they belong to.”
“What’s this one?” asks Perry.
“That’s a tally, probably of graves. Some battle took place that year.”
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. It looks like an ‘I.’ ”
“Looks like an ‘H,’ like the Square H on your branding irons,” says Perry. “Unless these triangles are part of it, in which case it would be an ‘N.’ ”
“They aren’t letters. They didn’t use our letters.”
“So you’ve broken in the house more than once,” states Cora. “You keep going back.”
“So obviously this is the year the Nashes stole your dad’s cattle and rebranded them,” says Perry. “I wonder why the Indians were so upset about it.”
I tell him, “You have more in common with Dewey than you realize.” Cora leaves the table and makes her way to the patio door. “Yes, I’ve gone back a few times, but now it’s in the name of history and archaeology.” Nothing can save a weak defence.
“I don’t want to hear about it. I wish you’d never told me, it makes me an accomplice.”
“For God’s sake, I didn’t murder anyone.” But she’s done with me. Perry and I gather the food and join her on the patio. I fire up the grill and close the hood and the three of us take our positions and wait for the gauge to climb. I say, “At least it’s my policy to be open. Openness is changing the world.”
“Are you speaking in the name of history now?” she asks. “And are you by any chance planning to sell that Indian stuff once you’ve justified stealing it?”
“This isn’t my problem, Cora. I’m just curious. I haven’t stolen anything. Besides, it’s illegal to sell artifacts. I just happen to know that. You make me sound like some voracious imperialist.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s leave it at that.”
The last line of the Maracaibo card keeps sounding like some inane jingle that won’t leave my head, like a wasp that refuses to fly out the car window, like neither of these because it invites pondering—“It seems important that no one I know has ever been this far south.” How does the south side look to you now, say in comparison to the unexamined if not quiet life you once lived here? But please don’t answer or things will get nasty and the exchange will end with me ducking something. To escape this conversation I listen to my boots along the middle of the road. Just hear the steps and try not to count, even though every ten strides is a first down on the vacant lot I’m passing, where I sometimes played football with Perry and his friends and still would if they had time for football any more. Something crunches under my boot. I look down at a few grains of hard wheat. I pick one off the pavement and roll it between thumb and fingers as I walk. There is no market for this stuff, though it’s the best there is and thousands die each day for lack of it, to revise someone’s observation about poetry. Eventually it rots, or rodents get it, or livestock.
When I finally answered the phone last night, Dewey asked that I be at Honkers at 9:50 sharp. I come through the door at 10:07 by the clock above the bar, the precise moment at which the ad for “Leesa’s Beauty Salon” flips over on the electric rollo-card device beside the clock-face. Leesa left town last year.
“You’re late,” says Roger. “He said you’d be here by ten. You better read this.” He hands me a nine-by-twelve envelope, then sets a shot of bourbon on the bar.
Inside the envelope are a note and Dewey’s draft of his latest letter to the Weekly News in response to spanking new and as yet unprinted insinuations about him—namely that he and Alvin Hall ran up against each other a few years back in the town of Pridemore, where besides so much dark fibbing Dewey added spice to the local nightlife with a legally unverifiable arson spree.
Re the burgeoning assault of Coca May. Frankly this troubles me, this digging around my old haunts and stomps. The enemy has reconfigured the battleground in mid-exchange, and has done so carelessly, I’ll add, by blindly trusting the unnamed source, who himself has it in for me. As I see it, the accusations must be countered directly, in the sort of nuts and bolts language you can fake better than me. Here’s my go.
It saddens me and perhaps others in the hereabouts that a useful dialogue on our beloved but sometimes ambiguous social rights and responsibilities has been lost to the sort of slophog smear tactics usually associated with the vile backroom fiends whose only talent is pulling excrement from their shirtsleeves. Now let’s consider my probable accuser. Have we been deceived by boot spurs and bilingual phone manner? No one knows better than Corporal Alvin Hall just exactly what happened in another time and town where he was stationed, where and while I myself lived. Yet we never knew one another then, so how could it be that he is able to correspond the “arson spree” he describes to the period of my residency? …
Baffled, I look to my drink and then up at Roger, who shakes his head slowly and says, “Can you fuckin’ believe that guy?”
“I’m not sure yet. What do you know about this?”
“He said it was private so naturally I read it. Or I started to. When I couldn’t see the point I just baled out.”
“Did it make sense to you?”
“I figure he’s running some scam. I heard him telling Karen about t-shirts the other night. Maybe he wants to turn the town into a theme park. You know, the home of the river werewolf. You come and buy t-shirts and dolls. Visit the House of Horrors. Take guided tours to the places the monster was sighted. We fake a picture, sell it as a postcard. Sell aerosol werewolf repellent. Silver-bullet key chains.”
“You’ve obviously been doing some thinking about this.”
“I got the time.”
I take my drink and Dewey’s letter to the table beneath Lenny, then call to Roger so the few others can hear, “He was just kidding about the shirts. It’s his sense of humour.” He nods, then shakes his head. I read on.
… residency? And then there’s what I’ve heard called “familiar rumours of unattributable violence in the countryside.” How come I’ve never heard of these earlier monster stories that the Coca May claims were even picked up by the Swift Current paper last summer? And where are the details of these fires and stories? Has anyone bothered to check all of this out with a simple call to the relevant Aunt Hazel or paper or hotel bar (Pridemore Inn—ask for Willy)? I’m being made out as some fang-mouthed travelling flame, nipping at and torching the social fabric wherever I go, and all because our corporal doesn’t want you to know that something other than me lurks in the night out there. Well I’m saying it does. It does. It does.
Looks like the tone needs some downshifting I guess. Go ahead and rewrite the whole of everything if you like, just don’t lose the logic of the defence.
P.S. I need a woman but no bites. Is it these corduroys and do I wear them too much?
Given that my recent past lives (but twelve months distant) show me possessive of a wildly vagarious nature, I can hardly bring myself to be angry with Dewey for his, which is simply more evolved than mine. Maybe it’s a sign of my good health that I wonder what he’s up to in the letter. He is so far beyond my usual notions of cause as to be a singularity, and it seems his reality is not to scale with mine. Maybe, like me, he sees people resenting his imaginative dimension. But I’m speculating.
I rewrite the letter to half the length and then decide that I don’t see the point of it and I’ll have to redraft. Meanwhile the bar has started to fill and before I can get back to work Dewey himself shows. He waves in the general direction of everyone (and everyone fails to wave back) and takes his seat.
“These summer releases are designed to make us all stump-headed. And tonight’s was a dog besides. I’ll never break even with this product.”
“You mean the Palace won’t. You do okay.”
“There’s the hourly base, but I live on commission percentage, minus dips in my liquid stock. Have you read it?”
“I remember doing so.”
“Did you buff it?”
“You don’t really shoot straight about these slaughter stories.”
“No.” A casual glance around. The question of most importance is whether it’s a good sign that everyone pretends to ignore him. “But it’s simple. It doesn’t take long for a newcomer in town to get drift of the local lore. In fact it was only when I’d heard the third or fourth version of the valley madman story that I took a notion. It lends validity to my cause to tap into a pre-existing fear of the truth. I didn’t realize you’d be involved.”
The “valley madman” story. Here is a best-forgotten lesson in what happens when a gale force will-to-believe meets up with people’s flimsy imaginations and twists them like so much fatigued sheet metal. The widely known tale has its origins in a badly kept Nash family secret. It is said that an uncle of Alan’s who used to live at the homestead, who’d gone silly during the First World War, was “sent away” after wandering off one night to be discovered the next morning, howling and naked at some farmer’s door. According to Marius this uncle actually existed and was harmless, but the Nashes didn’t know what to do with him and the town made matters worse by conflating the uncle’s tragedy with a nasty incident around the same time between the Raymonds and Nashes involving what Marius believed to be cattle theft, or rather cow theft—one animal went missing from our stock and turned up neatly slaughtered in the Nash yard. Eudoras and Marius conducted the investigation and pressed charges, which resulted in a cash payment and a change of plea on the Nashes’ part from innocent to guilty by accident. I don’t know the evidence in the case but it surely wasn’t a rebranded hide, a notion Perry lifted from some old western. The whole matter was grandly forgettable until the madman angle was applied, wherein the uncle roamed the prairie at night, hunted the animal, and killed it himself. This bad Hollywood did the Nash clan more harm than even they deserved.
“So you’re just reviving an old story?’
“Roger.”
“But why?”
“Don’t ask why. Looking for motive misses the point. Roger!”
Roger’s busy telling a story to some old couple at the bar. Without interrupting himself he sets up a shot and sends it sliding down to Walter Wall, Zinvalena’s dad, who has just deposited his coins on the rail of the pool table to put dibs on the next game and does us the favour of delivering the drink.
“Walter, you know Dewey.”
Without so much as a nod, Dewey takes the drink and downs half. Walter eyes him with a look that suggests he’s got Dewey all figured out.
“Don’t shout names,” he advises. “Roger there, he’s not at your …”
“Behest?” asks Dewey helpfully, finally looking up and smiling.
Walter leans close. “Disposal,” he says. “Disposal.” He straightens up, finds himself face to face with Lenny and for a moment seems willing to stare the moose down, then thinks better and walks off.
“Ominous word, ‘disposal,’ ” says Dewey. “What do you suppose it means?”
“It means just because his daughter works for you doesn’t mean he has to like you. It means if you keep up this bad form, someone will take it upon himself to permanently depart you from convention.”
“Is this your way of saying you won’t help with the letters any more?”
“Look, you don’t have to sell me on the value of living a life open to mystery, but what you’re doing, it doesn’t feel to me like you’re tapping into anything too deep. It’s just … pranksterism.”
“It’s inspired pranksterism. My moves are largely intuitive. But here’s a hint.” He cuts his eyes both ways, leans forward and whispers and pretty much cinches me as a co-conspirator in everyone’s eyes. “Those rumours I mention here,” he points his chin at the letter, “that I was an arsonist in Pridemore? Alvin Hall never started them.”
“You’d guess right.”
“You know, it’s one thing to make sport of the Coca May, but have you asked yourself why you feel this need to make an enemy of the only guy in town who wears a gun on his hip? It’s all good fun until someone loses an eye. Why not just invent an understandable motive to please people like me?”
Dewey looks up to Lenny, mouths a few words I can’t make out, then pauses as if listening for a reply, and bows his head.
“Let’s just say there’s a … higher reason. You see I have to use expressions like ‘higher reason.’ While others guess their way through all this slow dying around here, I’m certain this approach is the one I’ve been called upon to take. You see I have to use a phrase like ‘called upon.’ ”
A few words with Dewey and I could swear I’ve been transported to the outer spheres, somewhere farther along the galactic centrifuge where extremes are greater and firm ground doesn’t exist. It’s a wonderful feeling, frankly, but what Dewey wouldn’t guess is that, if it should come to a choice between one way of meeting the world or another, between indulgent out-of-bodiness and responsible earth-boundedness, I’ll take the earth. It’s just I’ve been taking too much of it lately.
When we finish up, he gives me a lift back to Cora’s house. Along the way we stick to trivia games, a language we can share. Who avenged the dead archer? Clue number one: Fred C. Dobbs, who guesses a mountain lion. I know the answer but string the game along until he drops me off. Clue number two: He didn’t mourn but he wore a black suit. The answer is Sam Spade.
“Bogart.”
“Very good. The second clue gave it to you. I wasn’t sure how strong you were on the black-and-white genres. We’ve never gone earlier than ’73.”
“A good guess. Next time let’s do history trivia.”
“It would have to be something we both know, so that could be a problem.” He pulls out the envelope and hands it to me. “You might deliver this for me,” he says. “Part of this being sacred is that it’s all mine.” A matter-of-fact statement of his convictions. “Something is being prepared for here. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s important that people continue to take these reports of mine seriously. It’s like some cartoon element is trying to creep in. I don’t mind people keeping their distance, I don’t mind if they include me in nothing but their suspicions, but it’s important I’m taken seriously.”
I hand back the envelope. “You’re still jigging the line on me, Dewey. I never asked to be part of any brotherhood with you. If this is really so sacred, just keep the secret to yourself.”
He seems to want to say something, then just shakes his head. I close the door and stand there until he drives off. As I walk to the front door I notice my truck has been moved. I see Perry has left his Pittsburgh Pirates cap on the seat. He owns a cap for every team in the National League East and superstitiously wears whichever one he got the best odds on with his friends in the spring. This year he’s riding the Pirates on the theory that pitching wins. Oddly, the cap makes me think of Bogart, my favourite pirate, pitching on the waves, heading back to Key Largo, the storm past and Edward G. Robinson dead on deck, and Bacall a sure bet still to be won.