Part 10 (1/2)

”I didn't want a start,” I said, my throat suddenly constricted again-with anger at her just for saying that.

”We don't always get to choose our starts.” She reached and levered my door open, pushed it back and shoved me in that direction. ”Now, go on. We're putting off the inevitable here. This is an adventure. Don't be afraid. You'll be fine. I said so.”

I didn't feel right saying anything more to her, even if I could've. My pillowcase with my possessions packed to go to Seattle was on the back seat floor. I hauled it over, climbed out onto the pavement, and closed the car door. Whatever Mildred had agreed with my mother to do, she'd done now. But what I wanted to do was climb back in the car with her and have her drive us as far away as we could go. Only that wasn't in my mother's plan when she could still plan things for me. So I did what I was told to-as much for my mother as any other reason. I stayed a good son to the end of it.

Chapter 42.

So did you hear all about me?” Charley Quarters said. We were rattling along through the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We pa.s.sed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky.

I said I hadn't heard anything about him.

”It doesn't matter,” he said. A lever-action rifle was barrel-down on the seat between us, close to his leg. His truck stank of beer and gasoline and the same strong sour-sweet stinging odor I didn't recognize. There was an animal carca.s.s in the bed of the truck, but I couldn't tell what it was. ”Here's what's going to happen,” Charley said. ”I'm going to be responsible for you up here. But you'll look after yourself unless I need you. You have work every day. You sleep in the Overflow House by my trailer. You eat in the hotel. A.R. owns it. You get there and back on your own. Though some days I'll take you in the Rolls here. And you don't cause me any trouble.”

Charley had the seat pushed far back so his feet barely touched the pedals, one hand on the wheel, and he was smoking Mildred's cigarette he'd previously put behind his ear. He was drinking another beer out of a regular can. A deer stood at the edge of the highway, chest-high in the wheat, its green eyes gleaming into the headlights. Charley sawed the wheel toward it, but it moved effortlessly back. ”G.o.d d.a.m.n that,” Charley shouted. ”I coulda got that one.” He leered at me, as if he was trying to scare me, and it amused him. ”How old do you guess I am?” he said, cigarette clenched in his teeth.

”I don't know,” I said. I hadn't answered anything about having duties. I hadn't expected to have any. I had no idea what I'd see once the sun was up.

”Don't you give a s.h.i.+t?”

”No,” I said.

”Fifty! But I look younger.” He talked in this clipped way. ”You think I'm Indian. I know that already.”

”I don't know,” I said.

”May-tee,” he said. ”You don't know what the f.u.c.k that is, do you?”

”No,” I said. Mildred had mentioned Metis, but I didn't know about it or even how you spelled it.

”It's the bloodline of the ancient kings.” Charley elevated his blunt chin and let the smoke out the sides of his mouth as he talked. ”Cuthbert Grant-all the way back. The line of martyrs.” He snorted in the cold air. ”Indians are entirely different. A lot of mental illness there. Too much drinking and inbreeding. They don't accept us. They want to kill Metis if they get the chance.”

He suddenly stood on the brake. I got my hands to the dashboard just in time. Though I pitched out of my seat onto my knees and my heart started pounding. We were stopped in the bright alley of gravel between the wheat fields. ”I need to. You need to?” Charley said. He had the engine killed before I could answer and was out the door, spraddling his legs in front of the truck, in the bright lights. He had his p.e.n.i.s already out where I could see him and was p.i.s.sing a hard stream down onto the dirt, concentrating fiercely. I wanted to. I hadn't had the nerve to say so to Mildred, though she was a nurse and would've seen such things. But I didn't believe I could do it in front of Charley, on the highway. I could've with my father. I was a town boy. So I just sat in the ticking truck, the headlights illuminating Charley and the widening circle of urine on the ground, road dust s.h.i.+fting through the open door, bringing in the lemony p.i.s.s odor. ”What happened to you?” he called out from the road. He made a little gasping sound before he quit. ”Did you get kicked out down there? You commit a crime?”

I hated to be staring at him and to see his private part. I said, ”No.” I didn't want to say, My parents got put in jail in Great Falls. My mother didn't want me to be in an orphanage. She wants me to be here in Canada.

Charley spit into the urine circle, then sucked back, clearing his nose. ”Secrets are good,” he said, zipping up. ”Up here's a good place to hide.” Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flicking flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder. Charley didn't see it. ”You know anything about A.R.?” He was still out in the road, talking, staring into the darkness above the cone of headlight. I believed he meant Mildred's brother.

”Mildred said he was her brother.” I didn't think he could hear me.

He scuffed his black rubber boots around on the gravel. ”You'll think he's strange.” He didn't seem to be doing anything now. ”What do you want to be called?”

”Dell,” I said.

”How many years have you got, Dell?”

I knew what that had to mean. ”Fifteen,” I said. ”Almost sixteen.”

Charley came back to the doorway and climbed up into the driver's seat, his animal odor accompanying him. ”Are you lonely?” He started the truck with a roar. The headlights dimmed then brightened.

”I miss my parents,” I said, ”and my sister.”

”So where'd she go? Some orphanage?” Charley closed his door and rolled up his window. Mosquitoes were whining around us.

”She ran away,” I said.

”Good for her.” He was silent, his hands on the steering wheel. ”You don't know anything about anything, do you?”

”No,” I said.

”What do you want me to tell you?”

”Why would anybody take me up here?” Again, what I said was only what I was thinking, as I had with Mildred.

Whatever had intruded into the headlights a moment before fell through again in full view. An owl-a curved, white face, wings extended, th.o.r.n.y feet grasping, its eyes intent on something beyond the light's edge. Then it was gone. I'd never seen an owl; I'd only heard them from my room at night in Great Falls. But I knew what it was. Again, Charley didn't seem to notice.

”A.R.'s peculiar. He's American,” Charley said. ”He's been up here a long time. Maybe he's lonely for company. I don't know. Let me feel your hand.”

His tough, hard hand, which was shockingly big, found mine and captured it and squeezed it four or five or six quick successive squeezes. His hand was thick and short-fingered and blunt-nailed and grainy like his canvas pants. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on, squeezing even tighter. ”Did that old nursy try to f.u.c.k you,” he said, as if he was about to laugh.

I couldn't look at him. I said, ”No.”

”She wanted to. I could tell that. She wanted to f.u.c.k me, too. We could've both done that. You don't want to let anybody do you that way, though. You wait on some nice girl. I got shown things too early. And here I am.” Struggling, I got my hand free and pushed it under my leg where he couldn't get it. He scared me. ”Okay, there are you, Dell.” He revved the truck, which made a racket. The headlights brightened down the road. Insects swarmed up. ”You don't have any interest in Hitler, I guess, do you?”

”No,” I said. All I knew about Hitler was what my father had related. ”Schicklegruber,” he'd called him. ”Little Adolf, the wallpaper installer.” My father hated him.

Charley pulled the truck down into gear. ”He interests me,” Charley said. ”He had his struggles. I'm misunderstood most of the time, too.” He held two stubby fingers up under his nose, his eyes suddenly wild. He turned toward me, gawking. ”Look-it this, see? He looks like this, eh? Got his little cute mustache. Nein, nein, nein! Achtung! Achtung!”

My father had said Hitler was dead, his wife with him. Suicides.

”He was a good artist, you know,” Charley said, revving the truck again. ”I fancy myself a poet. But we don't have to talk about all that now.” He mashed the accelerator, and we lurched away into the dark. It was Canada where I was now. It was my mother's plan.

Chapter 43.

Life-changing events often don't seem what they are.

Voices woke me. A man laughing, then the mutter of a second voice, then the sprung-metal bang of a car hood being shut. Then more laughing. ”I just wish a woman would tell me one thing I didn't already know,” a voice that sounded like Charley Quarters said. These voices were somewhere outside the room I'd been asleep in, a room I remembered entering, but didn't recognize. The cool smell of earth and something tangy and metallic and sour thickened the air. A thin gray cotton cloth with a white border was tacked over a window beside my bed-which was only a metal folding cot-softening what had to be morning light. I didn't know morning light where, or how long we'd driven the night before, or if here was my destination.

I sat up. The room was small and low ceilinged and green shadowed, as if water danced behind the curtain. I was tight-headed. My back and legs ached. I was wearing my Jockeys; my clothes and shoes and socks were heaped on the linoleum floor at the end of the cot. My memory was broken in pieces: a truck's headlights crossing a small white building; a door opening in; a flashlight beam jittering over a room with a cot in it; Charley Quarters urinating on the brightly lit gravel, staring intently down; an owl's plush face like in a dream; a mention of Hitler and Filipino girls; me-fighting to be awake, but failing.

I pulled aside the cloth and looked out the dusty window. One of its panes was cracked across, the glaze crumbled on the sill. Outside was a lilac bush, and behind it a patch of gra.s.s with dew still sparkling. Beyond that, a narrow asphalt street, pocked and heaved up, a concrete sidewalk humped and weedy, a square of perfectly blue sky, like a barrier.

An old white trailer on rubber wheels sat across the broken street-a rectangular flat-top trailer a person would live in. A TV antenna tilted on its side on the roof. Beside the trailer was an open-mouthed Quonset with a wind sock on top. Beyond that, a tall, wooden grain elevator with a steepled roof. The elevator bore faded lettering, high up on its bin. It said SASKATCHEWAN POOL and under that, PARTREAU.