Authors: Richard Ford
“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, thorny 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 fuck 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 fuck 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.
L
IFE-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 grass 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
.
Charley Quarters’ dented International pickup sat outside the trailer. Charley stood in front of it, speaking to a man holding a straw hat, with a tan jacket over his arm, and wearing a pale blue shirt. Charley was still dressed in his black rubber boots, his pants legs stuffed in, and the same flannel shirt. All around, the trailer’s yard was strewn with rusted metal implements, tires and empty barrels, bicycles, animal cages, an ancient motorcycle, and a green Studebaker car up on wood blocks—its windows out. Pieces of scrap metal had been bolted or welded together to make odd shapes and set off in the weeds by themselves. A bicycle wheel joined to a swather blade. A hay baler equipped with a steering wheel and a mirror. A sundial made of a wheel rim. Shining pinwheels and flashing whirligigs had been stuck up on wood sticks in the clutter, fracturing the sunlight. A makeshift wooden flagpole with the same flag as the border was leaned against the trailer’s side.
Charley turned, his short powerful arms gesturing spiritedly first at the trailer, then at the window I was looking out of. I thought he was discussing me, and that the man in the blue shirt listening must’ve been Arthur Remlinger. Mildred’s brother. I heard Charley shout, as if he wanted others to hear him, “Nothing’s foolproof around me.” He reared back and laughed. The other man looked at the building where I was, set a hand on his hip and said something and nodded. Charley turned and started across the grass toward me.
I quick got my T-shirt and pants on. I didn’t want to be in my Jockeys if Charley was coming to get me. I pushed my shoes on without socks. I looked for a door to get outside. There was another, empty cot in the room. All around in the shadows were piled cardboard boxes, barely allowing room for the cots. There was no lamp. I heard Charley’s voice already outside, “Who would you wish yourself on? I ask you that. . . .” I didn’t know who he was talking to.
I hurried through a low door into a kitchen room—tiny, airless, jumbled. More boxes were stacked there, a cast-iron stove, an old TV with a cracked screen, and what looked like a stuffed dog or a coyote placed on top of an oak ice box with corroded latches. I shoved my shirttail in my pants and went through a door out into a tiny dirt-floor vestibule room with its own windowed door, then right into the brash sunlight. Which stunned me, struck my eyes, and made me shut them, just as Charley rounded the corner of the house. Green, then silver, then red spots swam in my vision. My scalp tightened on my skull. I didn’t know what was about to happen. But I thought it was important. I was far away from Great Falls.
“Okay. Here he is,” Charley called out loudly. I forced my eyes to open. The white stucco building where I’d been sleeping was the one in my dream that the car lights had swung past. It sat flat to the ground, scabs of stucco rotted off, laths and interior plaster showing through. I zipped my pants. My shoes were untied. I shielded my eyes, my face twisted. “A.R.’s here.” Charley exhibited his large square teeth, grinning as if this was unpleasant for me and he enjoyed it. “Come up here now. He wants to see you.” He turned around and I came after him through the weeds, and we crossed the crumbling street toward the trailer and the Quonset, where the man in the blue shirt was speaking into the window of a shiny maroon Buick three-holer I hadn’t seen before.
I took my chance for a look around. It was a town, but not like one I’d seen—even when our father had driven Berner and me out to the Indian reservation in Box Elder and we’d viewed their homes. A few gray wooden houses were scattered along the remains of several town streets. There was likewise evidence of where other houses had been—empty brick foundation squares, falling-in wood outbuildings, a standing chimney, and open ground where something had existed but was gone. The five or six still-standing houses looked vacant—their outer doors hanging open on hinges, their yards weeded in. Some had no roofs, others had their roofs boarded and rough-patched, their chimneys crumbled and porches sagging. No electrical wires ran to anything except the white trailer and the Quonset and the house I’d just been sleeping in, and to one other house where the roof had a hole that rain could fall in. A large woman wearing a loose gray dress stood on the back steps there, watching us across the distance. A looping clothesline was strung up in the backyard. White sheets and women’s underwear bloomed in the dry breeze.
Off toward what looked like a paved highway, two big flapping grain trucks rumbled past a dilapidated row of flat-top business buildings across from the elevator. These buildings looked abandoned, their windows out and doors missing. No people were in evidence. At the edge of the town, which became visible as I walked across to the Quonset, a border of box elders and Lombardy poplars (I recognized these from Montana) had been planted to block the wind, but had died. Beyond these and the town’s edge were cut grain fields dotted with straw bales, and in the near distance, a bladeless windmill, and a black oil pumper patiently delving. Farther on, the land stretched away not flat but rolling, without mountains or hills, and almost no other trees as far as I could see. Only the horizon broke the line of sight a great ways off.
“Okay, here he is.” Charley was still shouting. I followed him across the weed lot toward the trailer and the Quonset where the new-looking Buick sat. The Quonset, I could see, housed an old cloth-top Jeep back in its shadows, and a flat single-axle trailer loaded with what looked like geese but were wood decoys, and a pile of shovels. “I woke the little baby up,” Charley carried on. “He’s used to soft treatment down in the States. He won’t survive up here.” He looked around for me. Charley was even stranger in the daylight—his knobby head larger, his shoulders unnaturally narrow, his legs bandied out at the knees where his boots stopped, his black hair still clutched back with his rhinestone barrette. He was a disturbing sight out in the open.
I put my hands in my pockets to keep from shading my eyes. They ached. Grasshoppers popped in the choke weeds and crawled across the ground at my feet, rattling like snakes—which made me tense. Tiny brown birds flitted among the flashing pinwheels and whirligigs and metal sculptures. The sun baked my hair and my shoulders and stung my eyes, though the hairs on my arms were cold and prickly. I’d begun to perspire in my hairline.
The man holding his tan jacket and a straw hat, who’d been talking through the window of the Buick—a woman was visible in the passenger’s side, laughing at something she’d just heard—this man stood up and began walking toward where I was.
“I had to pry him outa the bed,” Charley said still loudly—for the man’s benefit. “This is Mr. Remlinger. You can call him ‘sir.’ ”
I shielded my eyes again. Sun shone behind the man’s head. I was nervous. This was the man who was responsible for me. Arthur Remlinger.
“We’ve been waiting on you,” the man said. I looked up to see his face. He was tall and handsome and had fine blond hair parted carefully on the right side, the opposite side I parted mine on. He wasn’t smiling, but he seemed interested. I didn’t say anything. “Tell us your name, why don’t you?”
“Dell Parsons,” I said. My name sounded strange being spoken there.
The man looked at Charley Quarters and smiled. “Does ‘Dell’ stand for something else? It’s unusual.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Go on, speak out,” Charley Quarters said.
“Weren’t there supposed to be two of you?” The man stepped closer to me as if he needed to see me better. A pair of metal-rim spectacles hung from a string around his neck. His large hands were bony and manicured. He seemed amused.
“The other one ran off before she got here,” Charley said.
“Well, too bad,” Arthur Remlinger said. “You look tired. Are you all worn out?” He fanned his face with his straw hat.
“Yes, sir,” I said. He hadn’t said his own name. Arthur Remlinger wasn’t a name that went with the way he looked. It seemed like an older man’s name.
“And people are hunting for you, is that our story?” His eyes moved to Charley, then back to me. He wanted me to talk more, but I didn’t feel comfortable talking.
“I don’t know,” I said. Warm breeze spun the silver whirligigs in the weedy yard. They made soft clicking sounds, fluttering.
“He doesn’t enjoy talking,” Charley said. He turned and looked at the devices spinning. They seemed to make him happy.
“Well. If the RCMP come out here,” Arthur Remlinger said, “you just say you’re my nephew from back east. They don’t know where Toronto is. Would you like me to give you a Canadian name?”