Canada (30 page)

The Leonard dominated the west end of Main Street and was wood-constructed and three stories and perfectly square and painted white, with a flat roof and rows of empty unadorned windows, and offered a small featureless street entrance opening into a dark reception, a windowless dining room, and a shadowy windowless bar achieved through a narrow corridor to the back. The Leonard had a sign on its roof—which a person couldn’t see from town, but that I could see from down the highway when I rode to work and back. Red neon spelled out
LEONARD HOTEL
in squat square letters, and beside it was the neon outline of a butler offering a round tray with a martini glass. (I didn’t yet know what a martini was.) It was a strange sight to see from out on the prairie. But I liked seeing it as I came and went. It referred to a world away from where it was, and I was, and yet was there in front of me every day, like a mirage or a dream.

The Leonard, in truth, would not have seemed to be a hotel—compared to the Rainbow in Great Falls, or to fine hotels I’ve since seen. It had little to do with the town. Few town residents ever came there, except for drinkers and ne’er-do-wells and the bad-tempered farmers who Arthur Remlinger leased goose-shooting ground from, and who drank in the bar for free. The Leonard endured the blight of disapproval in Fort Royal, which had at one time been a temperance town. Gambling and girls were available, and most decent people had never been inside.

My duties were always over by two. If I stayed to eat supper at six, that is when I would often see Arthur Remlinger—always well attired, with his lady friend, Florence La Blanc, talking and joking and making himself congenial for the paying customers. I’d been told by Charley that I wasn’t expected to make conversation with Arthur Remlinger—in spite of our first meeting having been agreeable. I wasn’t supposed to ask questions or be conspicuous or even friendly, as if Arthur Remlinger existed in a rare state no one could share. I was a visitor there and was to understand I had no special status or privileges. Occasionally I’d pass Arthur Remlinger in the little reception or going up the stairs where I was sweeping or performing my swamping duties with my bucket and mop, or in the kitchen when I was eating. “All right. There you are, Dell,” he’d say, as if I’d been hiding from him. “Are you managing in your billet where you are?” (Or words like that; I already knew what a billet was from my father.) “Yes, sir,” I’d say. “Let us know if you’re not,” he’d say. “I’m managing all right,” I’d say. “Fine then, fine,” Arthur Remlinger would say and continue on his way. I would not see him, then, for several days.

Though in truth it was a mystery to me why, if he was willing to take charge of me and my welfare, Arthur Remlinger seemed to have no wish to know me—which was significant to a boy my age. He’d seemed good-natured but peculiar when I first met him—as if something had been distracting him. But he seemed even more peculiar now, which I assumed to be how it was to know new people.

On days I stayed in town, whiling hours until I’d get to eat again—following which I’d pedal back tired to Partreau before the dark highway turned treacherous with grain trucks and farm boys beered up for the evening—I often walked about the town of Fort Royal, taking a look at what it contained. I did this both because it was new for me to be alone and not looked after; and also because the little that was there made what I saw more striking, and I’d decided the way not to be forlorn and plagued by morbid thoughts was to investigate and take an interest in things the way someone would whose job was to write about it for the
World Book
. But, too—which is at the deepest heart of those lonely prairie towns—I took my tours because there was nothing else to do, and choosing to be an investigator conferred a small freedom I’d never known up to then, having lived only with my sister and my parents. And finally, I did it because it was Canada where I was, and I knew nothing about that—how it was different from America, and how it was alike. Both things I wanted to know.

I walked the hard pavement down Main Street in my new dungarees and secondhand Thom McAns, feeling that no one noticed me. I didn’t know Fort Royal’s population, or why a town was there or why anyone lived there, or even why it was called Fort Royal—except possibly because an army outpost might’ve been there in the pioneer time. Its businesses ran on both sides of Main, which was the highway, and there seemed to me just enough of everything to make a town. Grain trucks and farm trucks and tractors passed through the middle every day. There was a barber shop, a combined Chinese laundry and café, a pool hall, a post office with a picture of the Queen on the wall inside, a community hall, two small doctors’ offices, a Sons of Norway, a Woolworth’s, a drugstore, a movie house, six churches (including a Moravian, a Catholic and a Bethel Lutheran), a closed library, an abattoir and an Esso. There was a co-op department store where Charley had bought my pants and underwear and shoes and a coat. There was the Royal Bank, a fire station, a jeweler, a tractor repair and a smaller hotel, the Queen of Snows, with its own licensed bar. There was no school for students, but there’d been one—its square, white frame presence sat across from a tiny, treeless park, furnished with a war monument with men’s names carved in, and a flag and a flagpole. There were ten neat squared-off, unpaved streets of modest white houses where the town residents lived. These had clean lawns, often with a single spruce tree planted and a garden plot, the last petunias blooming in box beds, sometimes the English flag on a pole surrounded by white-painted rocks, or a Catholics’ crèche I identified from Montana. There was also a fenced-in dirt baseball diamond, an ice rink for curling and hockey when the winter came down, a weedy tennis court with no net, and a cemetery, south toward where the fields took up and the town stopped.

On my tours I looked studiously into the jewelry shop window—at the Bulovas and Longines and Elgins, and the tiny diamond engagements and the bracelets and silver services and hearing aids and trays of bright ear bobs. I entered the shadowy drugstore and purchased a small clock for my early wake-ups and breathed the scents of the ladies’ perfumes and sweet soap and the soda fountain water and the sharp odors of chemicals from the back rooms and the customers’ counter. On one afternoon, I stopped in the Chevy agency and inspected the new model they had—a shiny red Impala hardtop my father would’ve valued highly. I sat for a time in its driver’s seat and imagined myself driving fast over the open prairie, just as I’d done when he’d brought a new DeSoto home and parked it in front, and life for Berner and me had been uneventful. A salesman in a yellow bow tie came over and stood by the door, and informed me I could drive the Chevy home if I wanted to, then he laughed and asked me where I was from. I told him I was American, I was visiting my uncle at the Leonard, that my father sold cars in “the States” (a new expression to me). But he didn’t seem interested after that and walked away.

On another day, I walked to the shut-down library and looked in through its thick glass door, down the aisles of empty shelving, the toppled-over chairs, the librarian’s tall desk turned sideways to the door in the gloom. I read the marquee at the movie house, which operated only on weekends and only showed “horse operas.” I explored down the dirt alleys behind town to the switch yard, watched the grain and tanker cars shunting east and west—as I’d also done before in Great Falls—the same gaunt rail riders eyeing me as if they knew me as they slid past in the boxcar doors. I walked past the abattoir, where “killing day” was Tuesday—a handwritten sign said—and a doomed cow stood in the back corral waiting. I passed the Massey-Harris repair where men were back in the dark bay, soldering farm equipment with torches and masks. The cemetery was beyond the town limit, but I didn’t walk to there. I’d never been in a cemetery but didn’t think it could be different in Canada.

It is, of course, very different to walk through a town when you’re a member of a family that’s waiting at home a short distance away—as opposed to being someone who no one’s waiting for or thinking about or wondering what you might be doing or if you’re all right. I did these tours many more times than once that early September, while the weather changed, as it suddenly does there, and the summer I’d lived through disappeared, and the prospect of winter arose for me and everyone. Very few people spoke to me, although no one seemed specifically
not
to speak to me. Almost everyone I passed on the street looked me in my eyes and registered me as
seen
, certifying, I believed, that a private memory had been made and I should know that. And even if nothing in Fort Royal seemed distinctive to me,
I
was someone distinctive among people who all knew one another and relied on knowing it. (This was the crucial element my father had failed to understand, and why he’d been caught after he’d robbed the bank in North Dakota.) You could say I performed my tours the way anyone would who was a stranger to a place. But it was a place odd for being in a separate country, and yet didn’t feel or appear so different from what I already knew. If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound, and also attractive to me, so that in the end I liked it.

One woman with her daughter passed me by where I was standing at the drugstore window, doing nothing more than looking wondrously in at the colored vessels and beakers and powders and mortars and pestles and brass scales on display—all items the Rexall in Great Falls had lacked and that made the Fort Royal store seem more serious. The woman turned and came back up the sidewalk and said to me, “Can I help you with something?” She was dressed in a red-and-white flowered dress with a white patent leather belt and matching white patent leather shoes. She didn’t have an accent—I was acute to this because of what Mildred had told me. She was only being friendly, possibly had seen me before, knew I was not from there. I’d never been addressed this way—as a total stranger. Everything about me had always been known to the adults in my life.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.” I was aware that while she didn’t sound different to me, I possibly sounded different from people she was used to hearing. Possibly I looked different, too—though I didn’t think I did.

“Are you here visiting?” She smiled but seemed doubtful about me. Her daughter—who was my age and had blond ringlet curls and small, pretty blue eyes that were slightly bulgy—stood beside her, looking at me steadily.

“I’m here visiting my uncle,” I said.

“Who is he, now?” Her blue eyes that matched her daughter’s were shining expectantly.

“Mr. Arthur Remlinger,” I said. “He owns the Leonard.”

The woman’s brows thickened and she seemed to grow concerned. Her posture stiffened, as if I was someone different because of the sound of Arthur Remlinger’s name. “Is he going to put you into school in Leader?” she asked, as if it worried her.

“No,” I said. “I live in Montana with my parents. I’ll go back down there soon. I go to school there.” I felt good to be able to say that any of these things were still true.

“We went to the fair in Great Falls, once,” she said. “It was nice but it was very crowded.” She smiled more broadly, put her arm around her daughter’s shoulder, which made her smile, too. “We’re LDS. If you’d ever like to attend.”

“Thank you,” I said. I knew LDS meant Mormons, because of things my father had said, and because of Rudy, who said they talked to angels and didn’t like black people. I thought the woman would say something else to me, ask me something about myself. But she didn’t. The two of them just walked along down the street and left me in front of the drugstore.

ON THE AFTERNOONS
I didn’t stay on in Fort Royal and conduct my investigations and keep myself occupied, I rode the Higgins back out to Partreau with a small lunch box of cold food in my basket. This I would eat in my dilapidated house before the daylight died off. It was miserable to eat alone in either of the two cold, lightless rooms of my shack, since both were cluttered to the ceiling with the dank-smelling cardboard boxes and the dry accumulation of years of being the Overflow House for goose hunters who came in the fall and would soon be there again. There was almost no room for me, only the iron cot I slept on and the one that had been reserved for Berner, and the “kitchen room,” with the bumpy red linoleum and a single fluorescent ceiling ring and a two-burner hot plate where I boiled tar-smelling pump water in a pan to make my bath at night. Everything in the house smelled of old smoke and long-spoiled food and the privy, and other stinging human odors I couldn’t find a source for and try to clean, but could taste in my mouth and smell on my skin and clothes when I left for work each day and that made me self-conscious. In the mornings I cleaned my teeth at the outside pump and washed my face with a Palmolive bar I’d bought at the drugstore. Though as the weather grew colder, the wind stung my arms and cheeks and made my muscles tense and ache until I was done. If Berner had been there, I knew she would’ve been despondent and run away again—and I’d have gone with her.

But bringing food back and waiting until dark to eat it under the deathly ceiling ring would send me straight to my cot where I would lie miserably, trying to read one of my chess magazines in the awful light, or wishing I could watch a show on the busted television, while I listened to pigeons under the roof tins and the wind working the planks of the elevator across the highway, and the few cars and trucks that traveled the road at night, and sometimes Charley Quarters driving in late from the hotel bar, standing in the weeds in front of his trailer, talking to himself. (I’d by then looked up Métis in my
World Book
“M” volume and found out it meant half-breed between Indian and French.)

All of that would begin to conspire against me each night and swirl me up in abject thoughts of my parents and Berner, and of the certainty that I’d have been in better hands with the juvenile authorities who would at least have put me in a school, even if it had bars on its windows, but where I would have people to talk to, even if they were tough ranch boys and perverted Indians—instead of being here, where if I got sick as I sometimes did in the fall, no one would look after me or take me to the doctor. I was being left behind while everything else advanced beyond me. There’d been no mention—because no one talked to me except Charley, who I didn’t like and who never paid attention to me, and because I wasn’t invited to talk to anyone and therefore knew nothing of my future—there’d been no mention that I would return to anything I’d known before or ever see my parents, or that they might come and find me. Therefore it seemed to me, cast off in the dark there in Partreau, that I was not exactly who I’d been before: a well-rounded boy on his way possibly to college, with a family behind him and a sister. I was now smaller in the world’s view and insignificant, and possibly invisible. All of which made me feel closer to death than life. Which is not how fifteen-year-old boys should feel. I felt that by being where I was, I was no longer fortunate and was likely not going to be, although I’d always trusted that I was. My shack in Partreau was in fact what misfortune looked like. If I could’ve cried on those nights, I would’ve. But there was no one to cry to, and in any case I hated to cry and didn’t want to be a coward.