Authors: Richard Ford
Crosley asked Mrs. Gedins if there was food they could eat; they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, in Estavan. Mrs. Gedins frowned and said lunch (which she called “dinner”) was finished long ago (it was almost three) but the Chinaman would fix them something down the street. I could show them where it was—which alerted them to my presence. They said Fort Royal wasn’t such a big place (“burg,” Jepps called it in a nasal voice that was like Remlinger’s). They could find the only Chinese “eatery” in town. In Detroit there was a whole Chinaman town, they said. They often went there with their wives. They were eager to compare Canadian Chinese to their Michigan variety.
They asked to leave their suitcases in the lobby and wondered to Mrs. Gedins if there was any goose shooting to be done. On their drive up they said they’d seen thousands of geese in the air and occasionally one had fallen out of the sky, obviously shot dead from the ground. They had their shotguns, Crosley said, but seemed tentative about that. Possibly they might arrange for some shooting in the next two days. They wanted to see the sights, take the rides—as if visitors came to Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in the blustery cold of early October to enjoy its attractions. This wasn’t a believable thing to say and made them seem even more to be who Charley said they were.
Mrs. Gedins told them they would need to talk to “Mr. Remlinger,” who owned the hotel and did the organizing for the shooting. He would be available in the dining room and in the bar tonight. There were other hunters in the hotel, she said. There would probably not be places unless someone woke up drunk or sick.
Standing behind them in the shadowy lobby I was alert to their reactions to Mrs. Gedins speaking “Mr. Remlinger’s” name. It was Mr. Remlinger they’d traveled two thousand miles to observe—to conclude if he was a murderer and decide what they should do about it if he was. By what means they’d conclude this, I couldn’t fathom, since Remlinger, as Charley said, would never admit to the act, and almost no one still alive knew about it. I’d already wondered that day: what would a murderer look like? Once you committed one—no matter if you intended to or didn’t—did you forever have the act written on your face? Did Jepps and Crosley assume it would be simple to detect? And did you have “murderer” written on your face
before
you committed the crime? I’d seen pictures of murderers—again, in old movie-house newsreels. My father was fascinated by them and their adventures. Alvin Karpis and Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow himself, and John Dillinger. They’d all looked like murderers to me. Though they’d already committed their murders by then, so there was no doubt. Plus, they were dead. Shot to death, many of them, and laid out for their pictures. My parents, I’d decided, could’ve been recognizable as bank robbers long before my father entered a bank and robbed it. My sister and I would’ve been the only ones not to know it.
But the sound of Remlinger’s name, uttered in the quiet of the overheated Leonard lobby, excited no change in either Jepps’ or Crosley’s facial expressions. As if that name meant nothing. “Possibly,” Jepps said—his fat thumbs hiked his trousers up over his belly lump—“you could ask this Mr. Remlinger to speak to my friend and me. We’d like to shoot some geese if it can be arranged. We’ll come in the bar tonight. Tell him just to introduce himself. We’re friendly Americans.” They both laughed at this—though Mrs. Gedins didn’t.
The Americans walked off together down the windy little main street to find the Chinaman’s. But I hurried around to the back of the Leonard to see if a black Chrysler New Yorker was there, bearing a Michigan license plate. If they had asked me to have a meal with them, I would’ve gone for sure, though I’d already eaten. It seemed adventurous to get to be near them and know who they were, but for them to have no idea I knew. As if
I
was the one disguised. This excited me. I could’ve found out things about them, their plans, for instance—although I’d been forbidden to speak about this and didn’t, in fact, know what I’d be able to say or to whom. Anyone can see how a fifteen-year-old boy would be attracted to such possibilities.
The two Americans, however, barely noticed me and walked straightaway down the street toward the red
WU-LU
sign. I stepped outside to watch them. Jepps put his short arm around the shoulder of the younger man and immediately began talking seriously. “This is the way we want it,” I thought I heard Jepps say, his nasal voice catching up in the cold breeze. “Okay, I know. I know,” Crosley said. “But. . . .” I didn’t hear the rest, though I thought I knew what they were talking about. And I was right.
WHEN I GOT AROUND
to the dirt yard behind the Leonard, the hunters’ cars and the cars of the other guests were there, with Remlinger’s big maroon Buick parked and cold. Wind and tiny snow flakes were being pushed through the air. The CP yard was fifty yards across a long vacant lot. A switcher was nosing a single red boxcar along an empty rail, switchmen hurrying in the cold with their lanterns, throwing switches and hopping on the car as it passed. There was a job I would do, I thought, since I liked working, and if school never began for me again, and if I didn’t go to Winnipeg, as Florence wanted me to. Plans didn’t always work out, as Arthur Remlinger had said. I was finding this was true.
At the end of the row of parked cars sat the black New Yorker—a two-door, dirty with road grit, and with its green-and-yellow Michigan license plate. “Water Wonderland.” I envisioned green-carpeted forests with expansive lakes on which someone—myself—could paddle a canoe. A thing I’d never done. I’d imagined there would be a boating club in the Great Falls high school, and a chance for me to paddle out onto the Missouri. I put my hand onto the Chrysler’s hood and it was warm, although cold was filtering down into it. This car came from America, from the place it had been made. It represented whatever my father (and I) associated with America. The melting pot. The world drawn closer. I advocated these values. My parents had instilled them in me and my sister. It made me feel again that Jepps and Crosley, and their mission in coming to Canada, were upstanding and right—though I didn’t want it to succeed and for Arthur Remlinger to go back to America to jail. I’ve already said it’s a mystery why we affiliate ourselves with the people we do, when all the signs say we shouldn’t.
Yet, standing in the car lot, I experienced a great confusion. I might have been near the point of a breakdown of my own. My temples tightened and ached, and my chin and nose got numb (possibly with the cold). My hands tingled. My feet seemed unwilling to move. As odd as he was, and in spite of what I knew about him, Arthur Remlinger didn’t seem like a man who’d transport a bomb and set it off and kill someone. He seemed the last person to do that. Again, Charley Quarters could more easily have done it. Or the murderers in the old newsreels. In my view, Arthur Remlinger didn’t have “murderer” written on his face.
What he had on his face was “eccentric,” “lonely,” “frustrated”; and also “smart,” “observant,” “worldly,” “well dressed.” All things I admired (though I’d denied admiring it). So that what I decided—which was why I was able to move, and feeling came back in my face, and my hands quit smarting—was that Arthur Remlinger was
not
a murderer. Possibly these two Americans, in spite of their names and their car and being from Detroit, were not who Charley said they were. This was my habit of mind. My mother had written in her chronicle that to me the opposite of everything obvious deserved full consideration. The opposite could turn out to be the truth. Given my recent personal experiences with the truth, it might’ve seemed obvious that sooner or later everybody committed crimes, no matter how unlikely a person was. But I wasn’t ready to believe it. I didn’t know where I would fit into the world if that was true—since I didn’t want to commit crimes, myself, and fitting in was the thing I wanted to do most. So I tried hard to believe that Arthur Remlinger was innocent of what he was supposed to have done—since in all ways it seemed better to think that.
I
PERFORMED MY STANDARD DUTIES THAT DAY. I TOOK
a shorter nap because I’d lingered in the lobby, then gone out to inspect the Americans’ car. The days now held less light, and Charley and I went out nearer to five to drive the fields above the river and find where the geese were using, and instruct the Ukrainian boys to site the pits. These farm boys—two of them, brawny and large limbed—were brothers and kin by marriage to Mrs. Gedins’ deceased husband and were silent and unsmiling, as she was. They said nothing to me when Charley told them where to go and dig. They looked at me contemptuously, as if I was a privileged American boy who had no business even knowing them. I thought I wasn’t privileged at all, except that I had the strange privilege of having no real place and purchase on things and could leave, whereas they believed they couldn’t.
Arthur Remlinger put in no appearance during the day. Typically I would see him pass around through the hotel. Occasionally, as I said, he would grab me and put me in the Buick on some made-up proposition, and we’d drive off down the highway to Swift Current or toward the west, while he talked on animatedly about his subjects. None of this happened. And in spite of what I’d “decided” using reverse-thinking while standing in the cold behind the hotel (that he wasn’t a murderer, etc.), I believed his absence was related to the Americans’ presence. I suppose I knew my reverse-thinking about the Americans was wrong.
Charley Quarters, I knew, had led the Americans out to the Overflow House. Their suitcases were gone when I came downstairs, and their car was no longer in the parking yard. I thought Charley would make some remark to the effect that he’d been right in all he’d told me. But he had become tight-lipped and irritable, and didn’t say even the belittling things he routinely said—that I knew nothing; that I was feeble; that life was too difficult for me there; that I never would go to school again. The little he did talk in the truck that day had only to do with knowing about geese and shooting—the things he’d already said to me: that geese fly high with the wind but will sometimes fly under it; that they are smarter than ducks, though it wasn’t truly smartness but having good instincts; that Specklebelly geese liked the wheat but snow geese didn’t; that a goose could fly a hundred miles in a night; and that you really didn’t need decoys—a “fat farm girl in a black dress” would do as well if seen from the air. I had the feeling that when Charley rehearsed these things, what he was saying had nothing to do with me, but was taking his mind off something he didn’t like to think about. I thought that had to do with the two Americans.
I ATE DINNER
as usual in the kitchen, then came out into the bar at seven to mingle with the Sports the way Charley had told me to and to listen to the jukebox and talk to the bartender, and to Betty Arcenault about California, where Berner was, and listen to her stories about her boyfriend who she said treated her cruelly. The Sports were drinking and laughing and telling stories and smoking cigars and cigarettes. Two of the groups were from Toronto, and one was Americans from Georgia. These men had accents like my father’s when he “talked Dixie.” The two Americans from Detroit were in the bar by then, seated at a table to the side of the room under the large oil painting of two bull moose locked in combat, their antlers tangled in a way they’d never escape.
Their Fight to the Death
, this painting was called. Above it was a black-and-white sign that said
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
, which people had written profanities on. The painting was a favorite of mine—more than the dancing bear in the dining room. Once, years on, I saw this very painting, or one exactly like it, on a wall in the Macdonald Hotel in Edmonton, Alberta, and sat marveling at its mystery for hours.
The two Americans stood out in the smoky roomful of hunters and railroaders and detail men. They each drank one beer apiece, which they sat beside the whole time they were there. They had on clean shirts and nice trousers and regular brogan tie shoes, whereas the Sports all wore their hunting clothes, as if they were planning to go straight from the bar to the goose pits. The Americans also seemed ill at ease, as if the younger Crosley’s nervousness had overtaken the older man. They talked only to each other and frequently looked around the room—at the tin ceiling, across to the lobby door, toward the kitchen, and at the closed door to the gambling den. Arthur Remlinger was who they were waiting for. They’d said for him to find them to talk about goose shooting. But he hadn’t appeared—which signaled something important: possibly that Remlinger wouldn’t allow himself to be observed and had run off—which would’ve meant he was who they were looking for.
I stayed near the jukebox, watching, expecting Remlinger to stride in and begin circulating the way he did, joking and buying drinks around and promising everyone good shooting—behavior that never seemed natural to him. Florence’s car hadn’t been in the parking lot. I assumed she was away looking after her mother and managing her shop. Though conceivably Arthur didn’t want her there where the Americans were.
I, of course, didn’t know what the Americans had planned once they laid eyes on Remlinger and had to make their conclusion. Possibly they would see him and—I’d wanted to believe—realize he was the wrong man to set off a bomb and kill someone. In which case they could drive back satisfied and forget about it all. Though if they decided he
was
the murderer, then what would be their plan of action? It excited me to be in the noisy bar, where the Americans’ brains were teeming, and to know who they were when they had no idea I or anyone else knew, and to have that advantage over them. But there was also going to be an outcome to these events. Charley hadn’t said that, but it was clear he thought so, and that the outcome might turn out to be bad.
I experienced a second strong urge to talk to the men—although it wasn’t my nature to do such a thing. It was as if I wanted to move close to something risky and dramatic. I wanted to tell them I’d been born in Oscoda, which might mean something to them. Whatever I’d felt when I’d stood beside their car and touched the warm metal—the sensation of satisfying solidness, even of liking the men (who I didn’t know), of sharing something secret with them—all that, I wanted to feel again and believed I could at no threat to anyone. I would never tell them what Charley had told me. And I still thought they might accidentally reveal something important about their mission—what they thought about Remlinger, what they hoped to do depending on what their observations of him made them think.