Authors: Richard Ford
In truth, however, these worries about Charley (whose actual name, I learned, was Charley Quentin) never came to anything. Mostly he acted distracted when I was around, as if things were on his mind that deviled him and weren’t susceptible to fixing. I never knew or asked what they were. He would often say he didn’t sleep and never had. When I would sometimes look out my window in the middle of the night—the coyotes’ singing frequently woke me—a light was always lit in his trailer, and I pictured him inside it just lying awake, listening to his wind chime. He once said he’d had a “bad bowel infection” when he was a boy and that often came back to plague him and kept him from a complete life. I would sometimes see him outside his trailer feeding the birds that flew around his sculptures and silver whirligig devices; he was always adjusting their little plastic propellers to better face the wind. Sometimes he would bring out a set of iron barbells he kept in his Quonset and do lifts and squats and curls in the weeds. And still other times he brought out a bag of wooden golf clubs and a peach basket of balls. He would set the balls up onto tufts of grass and stiffly strike each one out toward the highway and the train tracks, skipping them off the hardtop, or clattering them against the sides of the elevator, or just sailing them out of sight into the fields. He must’ve had an infinite supply of balls, since I never saw him retrieve one.
Mostly, however, he was charged grudgingly to teach me what to do when the Sports were there. It was clearly a plan devised by Arthur Remlinger to keep me occupied until he could think what else to do with me. But I was interested in learning, since I wasn’t learning anything more than that by then and felt morose about it. I’d asked Charley about attending school—if I’d be allowed to, since a yellow school bus swayed through Partreau every morning, going west, with
LEADER SCHOOL UNIT NO. 2
painted on its side, just like any American school bus. Every afternoon it rumbled back toward Fort Royal, the students’ faces in the windows. It often passed me as I sawed my old bike along the road shoulder back and forth to work. No one inside gestured or waved or changed expression when they saw me, though once I saw the pretty, blond bulgy-eyed LDS girl whose mother had spoken to me in the street. She didn’t seem to recognize me. And even though I’d gradually begun to feel better about myself, more accommodated to where I was (as Remlinger had said), each time the bus ground past I felt a renewed sensation of being left behind, and that conceivably I would never sit down in another school room, or be educated or well rounded as I’d hoped I’d be; and that possibly (which was in some ways the worst part) I’d overestimated school’s importance in the grand scheme of things.
When I’d asked Charley about school, he’d ignored me. I’d learned from Mrs. Gedins—one of the few words she’d spoken to me—that a Catholic school for wayward girls was situated down the highway toward Leader, in the town of Birdtail, Saskatchewan, only a few miles distant. I thought possibly I could go there on my bicycle and attend on Saturdays, since she said school went on all week. But when I mentioned this school to Charley, he said that only Canadian children went to Canadian schools, and I shouldn’t want to be Canadian for any reason anyway. This was on one of the last warm blue-sky days, when a long, milky cloud line of what could’ve been the first winter storm hung over Alberta, which was only fifty miles away. Charley and I were sitting in two of his folding aluminum lawn chairs on a rock outcrop, watching below where a great flight of geese had settled across a barley field above the banks of the South Saskatchewan. More and more birds tilted in, landed, and took their positions to eat. The season for shooting them was only a week off. We were there to estimate the geese’s tendencies, to determine the fields they were using, note how many birds were present, where water was standing or dried up, and where pits might be set in for the best shooting. Even though I was uncomfortable around him, I was willing to be influenced by Charley and by what he knew and could impart to me, since I knew nothing about hunting or hunters or shooting geese for sport.
Charley had untied his black hair and wore a singlet undergarment that showed his short knotty-muscled arms and made his hands and chesty torso appear larger and more powerful. He had tattoos on both forearms—one that showed a woman’s smiling face with lush movie star hair like Charley’s, and had the words
Ma Mère
written underneath it. The other was a blue buffalo’s head with staring red eyes, the meaning of which wasn’t apparent. Charley had his old worn lever-rifle across his knees where we sat, a cigarette clenched in his teeth, and was training his binoculars on the long raft of geese strewn out in the distance above the shining river, and also on a pair of coyotes who were observing the geese from a hilltop and slowly moving closer to them.
“Canadians are hollowed out,” he said, after proclaiming I shouldn’t want to be one—something I hadn’t contemplated. I only wanted to go to school and not be left behind. I thought Canadian schools would teach the same subjects as American schools. The children on the bus all looked like me. They spoke English, had parents, and wore the same clothes. “Americans on the other hand are all full,” Charley said, “. . . of deceit and treachery and destruction.” He kept his binoculars fastened to his eyes, his cigarette curling smoke into the warm air. “You’re the son of bank robbers, aren’t you?”
I was sorry he knew about that. Arthur Remlinger had obviously told him. But there was no denying it. I didn’t think what he said about Americans was correct, however, even with my parents being bank robbers.
“Yes,” I said reluctantly.
“I don’t think that’s so bad.” He lowered his binoculars and widened his eyes at me, which made his head with its oversized cheekbones and heavy brows and large lower jaw look grotesque. He was wearing pink lipstick that day, but no eye makeup. One of Charley’s dark blue eyes—his left one—had a permanent blood blotch in the white. I wasn’t sure if he saw out of that eye or not. “My parents lived in a dirt-floor house in Lac La Biche, Alberta, and both died of TB,” he said. “Bank robbing would’ve been a big step up for them.”
“I think it’s bad,” I said, referring to my parents being robbers, not his parents dying. What had happened to my parents seemed like a long time ago, though it had only been a few weeks since Berner and I had visited them in jail in Great Falls.
Charley coughed down into his hand and spit out something substantial, which he scrutinized and flung away. “Something goes into me when I go down below,” he said. “Then something goes out of me when I come back up here. Not that I can go down there anymore.” He’d told me he’d traveled in America extensively in his past—Las Vegas, California, Texas. But things had happened—he didn’t say what—so he couldn’t go back. “It’s all played out up here. They all think they’re being cheated by the goverment. But they’re not,” he said. “This place is waitin’ to blow away.” I believed he only meant where we were then, not all of Canada, which he probably knew nothing about. He set his binoculars on the ground beside his chair. The air, two hundred yards below us, was thick with black-and-white geese and their sharp cries, conniving and flapping and sporting with and against one another, flying up and setting down. “You want to be gone from here in six weeks, that’s for sure,” he said. “It’ll turn into Siberia. North’s the wrong direction to go, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Why does Mr. Remlinger never talk to me?” I said, because that was what I wanted to know.
Charley lifted his rifle off his knees and carefully shouldered it, still seated in his lawn chair. I believed he was just sighting—which he often did. “I don’t get in his business,” he said.
He rested back against the stretched nylon strips to steady himself and settled the muzzle on one of the two coyotes we’d been watching. It was a hundred yards away, trotting down a bald rise where barley didn’t grow, in the direction of a second rise around which it could go unnoticed and draw closer to the geese. The other coyote stood farther away, beside a pile of stones heaped up from when the field had been cleared. This second coyote was motionless, silently watching the first. I didn’t speak then.
Charley lowered his rifle, gazed across the distance, took a deep breath and let it out, bit into the butt of his cigarette, re-sighted the rifle, pushed confidently back in his chair, cocked the hammer, breathed in again, then out through his nose, spit his cigarette to the side, breathed in once more, then squeezed off one deafening shot. I was sitting right beside him.
The bullet struck behind the first coyote. Even at the distance we were, I saw the puff of dust and chaff kick up. The second coyote instantly began running, its long back legs kicking around toward its front. It looked back and seemed able to run forward and sideways at once. The raft of geese below us made one enormous, piercing, frightened squealing sound that consumed the air. They all immediately but not quickly rose off the stubble ground in a great upheaval—a thousand geese or possibly more (uncountable, really) beginning to flap their wings and shout and rise and move away in one clamorous occurrence.
The coyote Charley had shot at stopped to watch the geese rise and circle over and around itself. It turned its head in our direction—two indistinct dots, with Charley’s truck a hundred yards behind us. It hadn’t put these facts together—the dots, the sound of a shot, the kicked-up dust, the unplanned rise of the geese. It looked back up at the great swirling column in the air around it, then scratched its left back foot behind its left ear, cocked its head to gain a better angle on the itch, shook itself, looked back at us, then trotted away in the direction the first coyote had gone—no doubt, I thought, toward where other geese were.
“I’ll see that devil dog again, wait ’n find out,” Charley said, as if missing the coyote hadn’t mattered and was just practice. He ejected the spent cartridge, reached around where his cigarette lay smoking on the ground. “The world’s got his number—in the person of me,” he said. “He thinks he’s safe. His death and my death are playmates. That’s funny. I know it, and he doesn’t.”
“What about Mr. Remlinger,” I said.
“I don’t get in his business. I said that already.” Charley stuck his cigarette back between his lips and looked annoyed. “He’s strange. We’re all wasted on somebody, eh?”
I didn’t understand what that meant and didn’t ask again. As I said, Charley Quarters made me uncomfortable. He seemed to be involved in life too much through death. I thought it meant he didn’t care about very much. If I gave him the opportunity to show me more about it, or tell me (which I intended never to do), he would’ve. Then that was all I would’ve learned.
O
N THE DAYS WHEN CHARLEY DID NOT TAKE ME
onto the prairie to learn about geese, and when I didn’t stay in Fort Royal and could be alone in my shack without constant despairing, I actually began to experience the illusion of being someone who had an almost happy life and hadn’t been given up on, and who still carried on an existence that, as my father would’ve said, made sense.
Time, in truth, didn’t seem to pass. I might’ve been alone in Partreau for a month, or six months or even longer, and it would’ve seemed the same, the first day or the hundredth, so that a small, impermanent world became created for me. I knew eventually I’d go somewhere else—to a school, even to a Canadian school, or possibly to a foster home, or by some means back below the border to whatever was waiting for me. And that this present life and its daily patterns and routines and persons wouldn’t last forever or even for much longer. But I didn’t think as much about that as someone might imagine I would. It was a frame of mind, as I said, my father would’ve approved.
The occurrence that substituted for the passage of time, day to day, was the weather. Weather means more than time on the prairie, and it measures the changes in oneself that are invisibly occurring. The summer days, which had been hot and dry and windy with deep blue skies since I left Great Falls, disappeared, and autumn clouds bore in. First mackerel clouds, then marble clouds, then whiskery mare’s tails with new cold slicing in behind. The sun sank southward and shone at a new angle through the dead trees around Partreau and brightly onto the white exterior walls of the Leonard. Suddenly it rained for days at a time. And after each rain—driving wind-charged sheets from the low gray clouds—the air became colder and heavier and penetrated the red-and-black plaid jacket that Charley had bought for me at the co-op and that smelled like sweat, though it was new. There were few warm days left. Woolly worms appeared in the grass. Yellow and brown spiders built nests and webs for flies in the rotted window casements of my shack. Box elder bugs were in my sheets. Harmless black and green snakes flattened out in the sun on the sidewalk chunks. Two cats emerged from the elevator across the highway, and mice moved in behind my walls. The brittle yellow grasshoppers were no longer buzzing in the weeds.
Inside the heavy school bus that passed me each day, the children had on their coats and caps and gloves. Geese and ducks and cranes had begun to fill the skies, wavering long silver skeins of them in the low sunlight, morning and evening, their distant shouts filling the air even at night. When I woke up—always early—frost came halfway up my windows, and the weeds and thistles around my shack door were stiff and sparkling in the sunlight. At night, coyotes ventured closer into town, hunting for the mice and the cats and for roosting pigeons in the broken-down houses and refuse holes. The dog I’d seen on my first day and that belonged to Mrs. Gedins, barked often at night. Once in my room, under my coarse sheet and blanket, I heard it growl and paw my door and whimper. Then many coyotes yipped and yipped, and I thought I might not see the dog again. (My mother hadn’t liked dogs, and we had never had one.) But he was there in the morning, standing in the empty street, the night’s trace of snow twinkling on the ground, the coyotes gone.