The Cavanaugh Quest (28 page)

The highway branched off to the left north of town and I had to pass Ted’s on the way. The bronze Mark IV was sitting in the sun. The morning felt like fall, clean and fresh and pure, as I headed inland toward the Canadian border, toward Jasper.

J
ASPER WAITED QUIETLY AT THE
foot of a two-mile-long slope laid between open mining abscesses where a forest had once stood. The town’s dust was reddish in the wide streets but the lawns were green and the air smelled clean. Holiday Monday and there wasn’t much moving. The swings in the school yard hung straight and above them purple clouds hulked like treacherous strangers. Tomorrow it would rain and the kids would go back to school in their slickers and boots and pee in bathrooms made of marble dating from the days when the Iron Range was throbbing, booming with vitality, money, power. The trees in the park reminded me of blackish-green inverted ice cream cones.

There was one main street, one key four-stop corner with high curbs, a Red Owl supermarket, a couple of gas stations with plastic pennants hanging limp and tattered. I kept on until I came to the Indian Affairs Center. It was a small one-story brick building that had once been a tiny post office, dating from the WPA. A picture window had been cut across the front, drawn curtains blocked the view, and there were three steps leading up to the front door.

I went in and stood at the counter where they’d once sold stamps. A beige-colored Indian girl with long shiny black hair held back by a beaded headband was banging away erratically at a typewriter. She nodded, smiling to acknowledge my presence, and finished typing with a flourish like a concert pianist’s. She got up, shapely in jeans, a triangular face with high, wide cheekbones, the kind that might wind up on the cover of Paris
Vogue.
She looked to be seventeen or eighteen.

“I’m no typist,” she said. “But I’m André Watts when I finish a letter. So, what can the Indians do for you today?”

“I just came up on the chance the director might be in,” I said. “If he’s not too busy …”

“You must be a Gemini,” she said. “It’s your lucky day.”

“I am,” I said. “There are two of me, two personalities.”

“And they come and go, right?” She held open the gate for me. “I know all about it. I’m one, too. Come on, back into that cloud of smoke.” She pointed to the office at the rear.

“Well, you’re a much newer model,” I said.

“I suppose—they just don’t make Geminis like they used to.” She was laughing to herself, a happy girl, as she went back to her desk. She reminded me of Kim, her eyes and her figure, but she was sure as hell happier. Carefree.

The director was in his late thirties, wiry, athletic-looking, in a faded madras shirt, faded blue jeans, horn-rimmed glasses, flecks of gray over his ears, and a huge turquoise ring set in worked silver. He was putting papers in a filing cabinet, puffing on a pipe which was putting out enough smoke to fill the room. There was a can of Brush Creek on his desk.

“Hi,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“My name’s Paul Cavanaugh—I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask you. If you’ve got a minute?”

“Sure, why not? Got all day. Have a pew.” He went and sat down behind the desk, stuck a pipe cleaner up the shaft of the pipe. “My name’s Whitefoot. Bill Whitefoot. Shoot.”

It was the sort of moment you have dreams about, the elevator beginning to fall free, the parachute failing to open, water closing over your head.
Billy Whitefoot.
I saw his framed diplomas on the wall, a BA from Mankato State, an MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota, awards and commendations from Kiwanis, Boy scouts, Lions … I thought of the boy driving the lawn mower tractor at Norway Creek, getting drunk because his beautiful young wife was over at the pool putting on a show for the rich men and wouldn’t pay attention to him anymore. Somehow he hadn’t turned out to be a deadbeat, drunken Indian after all … Wrong again, Harriet.

“Well, ah, bear with me a minute,” I said, trying to compose myself. “This probably won’t make much sense to you at the beginning. I understand that your father was a guide in the old days? In Grande Rouge?”

“Well, yes and no,” he said a trifle quizzically. “The guide, Running Buck, wasn’t my father. He was a friend of my father’s, or maybe he was a distant cousin from back in the reservation days. It’s a little hazy.” There was no particular bitterness in his voice, but the friendly shoot-the-breeze warmth had vanished. There was a depth behind the gleaming surface of his black obsidian eyes.

“Can you tell me?” I pried, hesitantly.

“My father was a warrior by nature, quixotic I’d call him, one of those doomed Indians who went into the white man’s world with a chip on his shoulder, blood in his eye … He went down to the Cities, Minneapolis, and broke his spear pretty damn quick. One winter did it, died an old drunk on Nicollet Island, age about twenty-four … For some reason the scavengers who picked over the corpse left his identification. Running Buck went down to claim the body, didn’t have the money to get it back, didn’t understand the red tape, finally had to come home, left my father for the city to bury.” He flexed his muscles, clasped his hands behind his head, and propped his feet against the edge of the desk. “My mother died in a tar-paper shack the same winter, half frozen, half starved, poisoned by antifreeze someone told her to drink to stay warm. Just a little Indian nostalgia, Mr. Cavanaugh, the good old days.” He sighed. “Shitty way to end the morning … Running Buck took me to Grande Rouge, which was quite an improvement on the reservation. Running Buck was a survivor, he coped, didn’t think about the way life was treating him any more than he had to … The State of Minnesota, America’s vacationland, even used him as a model of the trusty guide in a tourism brochure. He coped. God only knows what all this has got to do with you …”

“I was curious about a club my father belonged to in the old days,” I said. “They had a lodge near Grande Rouge, they went up from the Cities to hunt and fish.”

“Your father?” He sat quiet, waiting, eyes like wet pebbles on the beach.

“Yes, a man named Archie Cavanaugh. I knew Running Buck was their guide and I went up to find him, but I found out he’d died a few years ago … I wanted to hear what he remembered about the club, for a story I’m writing about the old days. I’m a newspaper man.”

“But how did you find me? I haven’t set foot in Grande Rouge in almost three years …”

“The cop there, Jack. I met him at the café, we got to talking, he remembered who you were, where you were, what you were doing … but he remembered you as Running Buck’s son.”

“Not surprising. One little Indian kid is pretty much like another and who cared whose son I was?” There was a dark shading to his voice but he was only stating a fact, not looking for an argument.

“Well, why would he have known all that?” I said.

He popped out of the chair like a spring, ran his hand through the black hair, went to a hot plate, and poured water into a teapot. I could smell the lemony aroma and the smoke. The typewriter clacked irregularly in the other room.

“I guess you never escape the past—you can kind of forget it, but you can’t get away from it. It’s like being an Indian or having a beard, looking out at the world, you may forget your color or the fact that you’ve got hair all over your face, you may think for a moment you’re like the people you see … but you’re not. You can’t escape being an Indian and you’ve still got your beard. And you can never change your past, your history … no matter how far you go. Something happens, there’s a Wounded Knee in your heart or your head or in the newspapers; and you’re socked in the guts with reality.” He wiped a mug with a towel and held it up to me. I shook my head.

“I just wondered if you ever spent much time out at the lodge, if you remember much about it?”

“The lodge,” he sighed, as if he were trying to remember, but a muscle jumped in his cheek and he looked away from me. “Well, I was born in ’39, I don’t believe I was ever out there until ’49 or ’50 … I did a few odd jobs, helped change from screens to storm windows and back, cleaned up the yard. I don’t remember anyone named Cavanaugh, though.”

“No, he was gone by then.” I watched him pour hot tea into his cup, add cream and sugar. “Do you remember much about the rest of them?”

“No, I don’t, I didn’t pay any attention to them. You’ve wasted your time, I don’t know anything about those men. It was a long time ago. Frankly, I’ve had better things to think about.” He regarded me coolly; he was not the same man who had welcomed me. The transformation was complete and I was wasting Billy Whitefoot’s time.

“But, of course, you got to know them later,” I said. He was going to get a surprise and I enjoyed the prospect, shattering the pipe-smoking, tea-drinking calm.

“What? What do you mean?” His eyes focused as if they had tiny laser beams at the center.

“Well,” I went on innocently, “at Norway Creek, when you worked for the Norway Creek Club. You must have known them then … They helped you get the job, didn’t they?”

He sipped his hot tea, deciding how to handle this unknown son of a bitch who’d loused up his lovely, quiet morning.

“Look,” he said quietly, “I don’t see what business this is of yours. You come out of nowhere throwing this stuff at me. What am I supposed to think?”

“Nobody made you trot out your autobiography,” I said. “I just asked a couple of questions. Don’t blame me for your neuroses … But what’s the point in lying to me?”

“What’s the point in even talking to you?”

“You don’t have to. Unless you’re curious as to who the hell I am and what’s on my mind.” I grinned at him, smiled into the scowl. “I can leave. Should I leave?”

He went to the window and stared out at the vacant lot behind his office. There was a vegetable garden in it and everything had taken on the darkness of the clouds.

“I was an Indian kid,” he said at last, returning to it like a comforting theme, “and they were doing a good deed. There’s no story in that and I wasn’t lying to you. If I ever lie to you, Mr. Cavanaugh, I guarantee you’ll never know it.”

I nodded. He was standing with his back to the window, everything under control again.

“Did you ever hear the story about the Truthful Whitefeet and the Lying Blackfeet?”

“No,” I said. “Anything like the frog and the scorpion?”

“There were two tribes of Indians,” he said, ignoring me, “the Truthful Whitefeet, who always told the truth, and the Lying Blackfeet, who always lied. Say you’re walking through the forest and you come upon a fierce-looking brave, you’re terrified, and he beckons you to come closer … Is he gonna skin you alive? Or is he going to lead you out of the forest? You don’t know what to do. And then this fierce-looking brave says, ‘You can trust me. I’m a Truthful Whitefoot. …’ So, what do you do? Which is he, a Truthful Whitefoot or a Lying Blackfoot?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You can’t tell.”

“That’s right. All you can do is take your chances and go with him.”

“Which are you?”

“Oh, don’t worry.” He laughed. “You can trust me, I’m a Truthful Whitefoot. Billy Whitefoot.”

“So did you know the Norway Creek connection?” I almost liked him, just for being a smartass like me.

“I knew who they were, they remembered me. They helped me out. Nothing too amazing about that.”

“They wonder what happened to you, Mr. Whitefoot. They’ve told me so … You disappeared and they wonder.”

“They do, do they? It’s been quite awhile. As I recall, they weren’t too terribly concerned at the time—”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Did they mistreat you? That’s not what I heard …”

“I don’t give a good god damn what you heard. Got it?”

“Good grief, don’t be so hostile—I’m only interested in the club, the history of the club. And they still speak fondly of you … But, look, let it go. I didn’t mean to pry.” I smiled at him. His was an adversary personality, life had made him that way; at the same time it was teaching him he could take care of himself in any company.

“I’m sensitive about those years,” he said, staring at his dead pipe. “I was a kid, very conscious of being an Indian, very aware of charity but needing it, too. The story wasn’t quite the way I told it to you … My dad did die drunk on Nicollet Island, froze to death in a snowbank holding onto a bottle of muscatel, the Minnesota Indian stereotype, living up to what was expected of him.” He began to scrape the ash methodically into the wastebasket. “He came back from the South Pacific, found his wife shacked up in Ely with a miner, took me and kicked her around pretty badly … she died that winter and the beating he gave her didn’t do her any good. He tried to make a living on construction crews, road gangs, finally saw he wasn’t going to make it, the booze kept getting to him, he’d go down and disappear in the Cities for several days at a time … one time he went down and didn’t come back, Running Buck went down and found he’d just died one night …” He was packing Brush Creek into the pipe, keeping his hands busy. “I grew up with Running Buck, went down to the Cities—they’re like a magnet, y’know, it’s where you go from up here, you’ve gotta go to the Cities, try to crack it down there in the white man’s world. Well, the only connection I had was those men at Norway Creek, those men from the Grande Rouge lodge, and I asked them for a job. They were real nice about it, thought it was a good idea … I liked it, then I married a girl I’d known a little up in Grande Rouge … I was too young, we were too young to get married, but we were both scared by life in general, it was easy to hang onto each other. It didn’t work out. Lots of things got to me, I didn’t amount to much, full of frustrations and anger. I started drinking, missing work, my wife left me …”

“Women!” I said, thinking of how odd Kim, the Kim I knew, would seem with this man, but leaving him the opening to go on about her. “Where are they when you need them? No loyalty …”

“No, no,” he said, “you’re wrong about her. She was a fine girl.” Memories brushed across his face; he put a match to his pipe and drew. I waited. “No, we were just wrong in getting married. Common error.”

I stood up.