16
HOW DO you remember at this latitude of the mind? By way of escaping my current life I find my furthest thought somewhere under a flat winter sky, an interior landscape, we keep inside, there’s something out there that wouldn’t think twice about killing us. It’s Halloween night in Churchill and in the dark just past the edge of town polar bears move in the infra-red tracking needed to keep them at a safe distance when they get curious about the taste of small ghosts. I saw this scene on tv a few springs back when the tube was all mine because Marcie had decided to remove from her life all the low-frequency emissions she could. She’d come across some scary scientific claims. Thus no VCR machine, no home computer, no repair for the microwave, not even any visits to the Warren clan, who live near a giant transformer but chalked up a strange series of calving deaths to statistical coincidence. But now I’m back to the colourful seasons that show up past behaviour, mine, Marcie’s, as a little unbelievable. As actualities recede they often seem less plausible. Example—Marius once explained that some trees explode in the winter, and that a hard snow could leave cattle hanging from tree branches, and that grain harvested too early and mounded had been known to spontaneously combust. I’ve never seen these particular marvels, but know them to be true. Marius himself is the mystery, more of one each year, a sad condition with no antidote which sometimes leads me to futile and excessive attempts to erase myself, usually to my public humiliation.
Last night I remember describing a certain movie poster, my favourite of all time, picked up in a nostalgia store in Edmonton. Dewey kept coming and going and I felt I had to start over a few times so he could follow my line of thought. He was setting up early so he could open, this being a potentially bumper-crop night what with the holiday and a sure-fire summer blockbuster. He said I was drinking too fast and I said something witty like Look who’s talking. The poster’s title, in giant but crumbling blocks, was The Valley of the Maya, below which were elephants and lions and some brand of overgrown housebird and kids out of Disney’s Jungle Book, and then in smaller blocks “From the Jungles of Amazonia,” starring a few Anglo names, and finally, at the bottom, “Shot on Location in India.” A big budgie release, quite obviously. You don’t seem to understand (I might have told him, forgetting my malicious suppositions about Mulwray and the milkweed butterfly), this is a geographic impossibility and Hollywood thought no one would notice. His response semi-audible as he vacuumed the foyer, Noticing is one thing but caring is another, it isn’t really inaccurate because it’s so common, these unpopped kernels don’t pick up, the studios call it time-neutral. Then I finally spoke my sorrows—first about Karen, which didn’t surprise Dewey in the least, given the unwelcome portents of my visitor, and then about last Thursday’s card from Marcie, now in Costa Rica. I’ve been reluctant to think about it too directly but it’s always there, rattling around in my brain pan—her resolve to stay put for a good while in such a natural paradise, her providing me a return address, of all things, to extend a measure of kindness and cinch my long-divided attention.
Dewey said I could talk all I wanted about my marriage but not to suppose he’d value my version above any other he’d heard, and he then ran the others by me, maybe to keep his cold distance from my own understanding. Certain matters were agreed upon, namely that I was the last remaining member of my family, resentful of my neighbours because they’d made a go of ranching at my family’s expense, and so with clear motive I had taken revenge upon the Nash clan by ruining the marriage of Alan and Wanda by means of (only here the variants begin) seducing or attempting to seduce the said Mrs. Nash and/or her daughter Eileen, or rather I myself was a victim of my neighbour’s adultery and retaliated with a counter-coupling and the recent attempted demolition of Alan’s house. I had had no idea of the variations.
I commented how the women in these accounts were remarkably compliant with the machinations of the menfolk—for which, Dewey added, they had been sent into exile while (some have heard tell) with child.
“And the reason I know there’s not a grain of truth in any of it”—Dewey unlocking the door—“is that it’s all reckoned on the basis of obvious motives, which, as I’ve already told you, are usually a too simple fish, and unoriginal besides.”
“Have you told this to Karen?”
“We haven’t discussed you in those terms. For reasons I can’t guess she seems to be attached to you, so I don’t suppose she’d fall for anything so farfetched as a story of sex, murder and revenge. Though it’s true stranger things happen from time to time.”
The arrivals began. I stashed myself out of the way behind a curtain on the stairwell to the projection booth, pathetically cuddling Dewey’s bottle of rye, which wouldn’t have been my first choice, and worrying about—of all possible concerns—Zinvalena showing up any minute and finding me so far gone so early in the night. There was a long time of drifting between states of consciousness, bodiless voices prompting mini-dreams, exotic scaly animals that never blink staring me down on the steps of some ancient pyramid or observatory or ball court, each structure a mathematically designed calendar based on the positions of some planet or other, tourists in floppy shorts milling about in awe of the sheer concentration that must’ve gone into all this and yet in other respects this noble race was primitive, sacrificing their own, and small.
“Small it is,” said Zinvalena, scooping a bag of popcorn.
“And with not quite so much butter please, dear.” The voice of another Marleyfoot, Eunice’s daughter-in-law, the woman known as “Mrs. Donald, The Backbencher’s Wife.” She once complained to Basso that she’d examined her sister-in-law Altha’s notebook and discovered our revered national history reduced to cartoons.
“It’s not exactly butter,” Zinvalena ventured.
“Surely you don’t mean.” I’d called her up and said, Don’t think of them as cartoons—think of them as doodlings. She said, It’s no difference what you call them, there’s nothing to be learned from them. I said, Even now, I’m doodling on a pad by the phone here, and you know what I’m drawing so I’ll remember your concerns? I thought she’d hang up but, stupidly, she hung on and asked, What? Our provincial coat-of-arms, I said, the one your husband sits beneath over in Regina. You must know it. She said she’d seen it but couldn’t quite recall. I said, With the three wheat sheafs and the yawning red dragon. In my version here, the dragon gets a fiery little voice, and you know what the dragon says? She says, “Please come home, Donald. I’m sorry I burned your ass.”
Of course, there was no fallout. Who could she bring herself to tell?
“But it’s perfectly safe. And more yellow than butter,” said Zinvalena with not a trace of impatience.
“Well that’s fine, dear. Maybe I’ll just have a package of these.”
“The strawberry licorice is fresher.”
“Oh, but I’m allergic to certain fruits.”
The word I called out was “hagglehag!” The voices fell silent for a few seconds, presumably wondering where the word had come from and what it meant. There was, as I remember, no real commotion, and it was with some disappointment that I eventually nodded off and lapsed into a rerun of the tornado-delivers-riverboat-to-1930s-China dream I’d told Cora about, which now seemed very obviously a reference to Norman Bethune, he of the world’s most serious face, who looked nothing like Donald Sutherland. I’d seen one of Bethune’s medical bags once and read some of his letters from Madrid and Sung-yen K’ou, and resolved to reinstate the term “hero” as part of my earnest vocabulary. Mobile blood banks and medicine shortages. I diagnose traumatic bursitis below the left patella. Where are my anti-inflammatories?
“Will you shut up?” Dewey, climbing over me on his way down from the booth.
“What was I saying?”
“Zinvalena’s trying to sell candy and you won’t stop mumbling ‘Norman.’ ”
“Is she out there?”
“She’s gone off to the Riverside bash.”
“Did she see me?”
“No”
“Did she know it was me?”
“Of course.”
“Ahh.…”
“I told her you were distraught.”
I realized I was on my feet and he had his arm around me, helping me across the lobby. Briefly I glimpsed my face in the window of the popcorn machine and noted I looked like some freakish thing just hatched in an incubator.
Outside, we buddied over to my truck. Dewey propped me up and told me to give him my keys. I fished around for them and looked back at the Palace and was flooded with a swill of memories.
“Are you gonna torch this place?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why did you tell Perry—”
“It loses its effect if I have to explain.”
I gave him the keys. He opened the door and shoved me in.
“I’ll look in on you later.”
“Karen’s leaving me, Dewey.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“It doesn’t show. Another prairie stoic.”
The rest of the night has even less continuity. Impressions suggest a lot of people transporting me from place to place. Presumably by Dewey’s agency I appeared at Perry’s reunion dance, or rather outside the dance, propped on a bench in front of a fire pit. People kept poking the flames with sticks, pretending to roast marshmallows and wieners, and the flames kept asking me to make them stop. It’s difficult to recapture the degree of misunderstanding that ensued. There was some one-sided wrestling involved, which could also explain my fat lip, though I’m not sure who or how many I lunged at and can only hope they were my size. But making an ass of oneself in any memorable way requires more labour than I first realized, it turned out, because someone thought it safe to let me inside the dance hall. The band on stage looked very early seventies and featured long guitar and organ solos that set everyone into conversation about the stupidity of reviving a decade of wing collars. Or at least that’s what we should have been talking about. The people at my table, whoever they were, didn’t seem to say much of anything, at least not to me. At some point I hit upon a strategy of exercising control over a dance partner. I wandered lonely from table to table and recognized a good many former students, though not all of them recognized me, until finally Perry laid an arm over my shoulders and led me to dark virgin air. We passed by the fire and when it called to me one last time I knew I was sobering up because I said, perhaps aloud, The real world is a place where fires don’t ask favours. What a great surprise to be guided to my own truck. Perry even had the keys. He listened for what was perhaps a very long time as I tried to explain that I was at that very moment trapped in a country-and-western song and my heart was a-twangin’, my stomach providing slide-guitar accompaniment. He asked did that mean I was going to puke. I said I hadn’t had a drink in a few hours and wasn’t as drunk as I pretended to be, though I wished I were.
“I do this in full knowledge of the consequences,” I thought or said, popping open the glove box and removing the stack of postcards. I went back to the fire and spoke in loving terms about wounds and balms, nothing very eloquent, maybe I even used a brand name or two, Polysporin seems likely, but the assembled listened politely. Then I offered the cards to the flames and watched them disappear until the fire had the nerve to spit an ember at my pant-leg.
I make my way to the kitchen to turn on the stove light and put on the kettle to fix a medicinal dose of peppermint tea, then laboriously take off my clothes and the distinctive odour of firesmoke. Sitting at the table I notice I have my morning shape—a slight expansion around the middle I attribute to the pooling of blood in the vital organs while horizontal, a little bodily principle I once learned by way of a coroner’s testimony at some murder trial, either in the paper or on tv. The boyfriend claimed that the girl had fallen from the balcony while stoned, and landed hung up vertically in some power lines or tree branches, and yet the blood was collected around her stomach, meaning she had died lying down and had then been tossed off the balcony. Or something. Everyone was satisfied the boyfriend was guilty, given that it’s tough to argue with the circulatory system and he was a known trafficker of mind-altering substances. As the water begins to boil I can feel my viscera start up. I stupidly look to my bullet-hole navel, as if it could tell me anything about what’s going on beneath.
Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time, wrote some French poet, blood and time meaning something different to me now than when I first committed the lines to memory. The terms are now precise and I don’t bring to them the adjectives of limited perspective—flowing, coursing—because even these are approximations. Instead there is just blood, stupid and untrustworthy, no more measurable than fear, and fear like memory a visitation. There are no distances between me and the remembrances or imaginings made palpable by whatever is around me to prompt them. In the sound of a kettle boil are undertones of wind or thunder, buffalo herds, not just their weight but the animals themselves, their cries as audible as the human cries of the hunters. And when the tea is poured and the kettle grows quiet the sounds are still with me, the roar and squall of abandonment so clear, so very clear, so clear at the moment, in fact, that I begin to worry whether this is the onset of delusional psychosis. Now follow inhuman screeches. A glance to the living-room verifies that the tv and radio are off, and yet the shouts grow more urgent, several voices calling above the screams and howls, so that, much as I’d like to deny it, the general impression is that someone, perhaps myself, needs help. As I turn off the light and run to the front-room window I consider a half-formed explanation involving some troupe of monster hunters moving in for a kill (or have the antelope appeared? the elk? do such animals screech?), a notion so implausible that what I see through the window is by comparison almost believable.
The daily-news heroes, people who run into burning buildings to save children, are forever telling us their actions were not courageous but instinctive, often adding that if they’d had time to think they wouldn’t have had the mettle to act. The instant I leave the house I realize these people are liars. What I run towards does not make sense in any conventional way, not the shadowy commotion or the shouts and hellish howls, but even in the dark the assault on Mulwray’s van is clearly delivered with vicious intent, and the beast rocking the vehicle cuts a feral line. I stop just outside my door and consider my likely fate. The creature is obviously other than human or benign and looks to be about seven feet tall on its hind legs, about the size of a well-nourished werewolf, I suppose. There is hair, snout, no doubt the sharp particulars. Its forelegs are bashing the side windows. In all the noise I can distinguish Mulwray inside the van, screaming.
I wave my arms and shout a “Hey hey you!” in half-hearted hopes of drawing a charge from which I might run into the house to think of something else, maybe locking myself in the bathroom. But the monster can’t hear in the clatter and hasn’t yet scented me. As my luck would have it, Perry didn’t put the elevation lights on and the yard is lit only by the moon.
I run to my truck and jerk open the door. When I pull the rifle out from under the seat a box falls over and spills shells onto the floor. In the interior light I load up, my hands suddenly all quivers and tics, but through the back window the light glares and I can no longer see the monster, and am confronted instead by my own reflection in the glass, the outside showing through only where my lips should be. I back out and close the door and fall to one knee as riflemen do in the old westerns. For three or four seconds nothing is clear but then I see it again, now on the other side of the van, thrusting its bulk at the door. The animal screeching has almost subsided and Mulwray is clearer than ever, and now I hear somewhere to the east an animated conversation about stupid risks and useless weaponry. A man and a woman, and the woman’s voice is vaguely familiar.
The beast is in my sights now. I’m surprised to find that my hand tremors have subsided. Marius said everything rides on the first shot.
Just as I squeeze it off, something hits me from behind and drives my bad shoulder into the ground. The shot takes out one of the van’s headlights and the .22 is thrown from my grasp. I bellycrawl to get it back but someone beats me to it.
“Jesus Christ, it’s me!”
“Over there,” I say weakly, then look up at Perry. “A wolf.” But the wolf isn’t there. Perry points to the yard entrance where I see the monster in bipedal sprint to a pickup truck.
“My guess is Beyer,” he says. Without losing any time the intruder sheds his outfit on the road and gets into his truck. A second later the voices stop. “You could’ve fuckin’ killed him.” The truck and Mulwray’s van start up at the same instant. Mulwray is first out of the yard and up into the hills.
Perry explains, “It was Aliens. I recognized Sigourney Weaver right off. She’s what woke me up. He’s spliced the audio from the big encounter scenes and piped them through roof-mounted speakers on his truck. I could see the truck from the upstairs window.” Then he runs off to collect the disguise, which figures to be the lion from an old school production of The Wizard of Oz, stored with the clown suit in the town-hall basement.
“Everything’s changing to wilderness around here.” He unbundles the suit and holds up the head. It’s a bear suit, the giant brown grizzly named Grady, former team mascot of the Bucks back when they were known as the Bears. “Better get some clothes on before the Mounties show up. Things like this don’t stay quiet for very long.” I get to my feet and we start towards the house. “Let’s face it, Toss. The guy’s cracking up.”
Perry goes inside but I turn around and look for a few seconds at the rifle, left leaning against my truck, then walk back and pick it up. I take it down to the river and confirm that the chamber is empty. I spin once in a shortened hammer-throw motion and release it out over the river and into the first signs of day.
from the digital clock on the tv behind me. Perry must have put me down this way. When I sit up and look out the window I’m surprised to see in the yard the dark forms of both Mulwray’s van and my truck in its spot next to the house, which means Perry didn’t go back to the park and is likely asleep in my room. Caught up in my stupor I forgot to ask if he’d had any luck charming Polly to the dance. Obviously not. To make matters worse, the very cousin who set him up for rejection and for the reunion horrors then caps off the night by launching drunken assaults at innocent wienie-roasters and generally haranguing the would-be celebrants. Some people in my position would hate themselves but I know better. Mine are ordinary failings. My only regret of the past day is that I was angry with Karen and behaved like a cornered rat when she told me Kate’s plan. The night’s events were just the harmless consequence of telling myself to get lost, the one thing I do well. As for the postcards and the Costa Rican address, I can’t honestly say I feel lightened, but whatever she intended by them, Marcie’s reports were setting back my efforts at home improvement. Though I’m very close, I’m not quite yet willing to readmit certain universals to myself, at least not in the usual terms like love and loss. They are both absolutely beyond the reductive powers of language, even if love is not beyond sensual understanding, not just sex but loving someone as a movement in the background, sounds from another room, or, as with Karen, the sour smell of blue jeans left hanging on the arm of a chair. But then maybe language isn’t always reductive. Who’s to say and what difference does it make? I’m back home, my head hurts, my best judgement lags severely. I have furthered my local fame.