by Richard Ford
“I don’t admire him,” I said, bringing the geese I’d cleaned and feathered-out myself, to drop in the freezer with his. Though I had almost admired him.
“A person who wants his well-deserved punishment to be over with is a desperate man,” Charley said, his wide back to me, so I could see the shine of his barrette in the shadows. “You don’t know that,” he said gruffly. “You know less than anything.”
It was densely cold where we were in Charley’s Quonset, everything stiff and painful to touch. “What should I know?” I asked. “What use would he have for me?”
Charley Quarters turned, his arms full of gray featherless geese bodies, and smiled the heartless way he had the first night we’d been in the truck on the dark road north of Maple Creek, when he’d grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and I wanted to jump out and run away. “I told you. Men are coming up here right now. He understands his situation. He understands himself better than I understand him. But he’s weak. I don’t blame him.” Charley pushed up the heavy freeze-box lid with his elbow. Down inside were whitely frozen geese, hard as ingots. He dropped his armload, thumping on top of the others, and stepped back. I did the same and turned quickly toward the lighted Quonset door. I didn’t like being alone and close to him. I didn’t know what he might suddenly do.
The men—two of them, Charley said, as he drove me back into Fort Royal in the truck—were from Detroit, in America, the scene of Remlinger’s crime, fifteen years previous. Arthur had informed him about them late in the summer, when the interests that were in touch told him to prepare himself. (They still considered him erratic, Arthur admitted.) The police case had long ago been given up. But there were people who stayed aware of it and kept their eyes and ears open. And unexpectedly Arthur Remlinger’s name had become audible. “A fluke, pure and simple,” Arthur said. There was no suspicion to link him to the crime or to think he might be a person to officially talk to. It would need to be a private matter. The murdered man’s family and the union associates had all gotten old and had never believed Arthur was capable of murder in the first place. But when it was found out where he was—a tiny, faraway Saskatchewan town, living alone and unexplained in a hotel—and that he’d had associations with the old dead Herschel Box, a name known in their circles, then things were put together with other things known about him (the row with the union steward years before, the pamphlets, being a troublemaker at Harvard), and it began to seem plausible this Remlinger, an American who’d oddly become Canadian, might be a person to go see in the flesh. If someone could see him when he didn’t know he was being seen—enter his life unnoticed—then his likelihood to be a criminal could be judged. After which—assuming he was considered guilty, or at least an accomplice—discussions could begin over what to do about him. “He must’ve thought I lived and breathed his fucked-up life,” Charley said, driving.
Arthur said it was felt he had nothing to feel concerned about—two men sent to look at him. He should do nothing outside the ordinary—run away or admit anything, or act in an incriminating manner that would give these men reason to suspect he did blow up the union hall. (Which he had done, Charley said, “because nobody would make that up.”)
It was thought that the two men who were on their way—driving across the middle west in a black Chrysler New Yorker, turning north and across the border to Canada—were without much dedication to their mission. Their names were known. Crosley—the young son-in-law of the murdered Vincent; and an older, retired officer, Jepps—not a family member but brought along to maintain sound sense. These two had little thought Remlinger was the man they were looking for. They were making the trip all the way to Saskatchewan as much as an adventure as a manhunt. They might do some goose shooting if it could be arranged and all else failed. Neither had they given much practical consideration to what they might do if Arthur Remlinger turned out to be the criminal, and they were faced with him—in a foreign country where they knew nothing but the language, and were forced to do something: demand he come back to Detroit (and do what?); go all the way back themselves and convince the police to be interested again (on what evidence?); kidnap Arthur, a full Canadian citizen, and transport him across an international border. (How, and then do what with him? Shoot him? They had pistols; this was known—which became their fatal mistake.) These were average, uncomplicated working men—more like the Sports who congregated in the bar at night than men driven by justice or vengeance. Likely, Remlinger was told, they were already thinking about arriving at the Leonard, seeing nothing was out of the ordinary about him (even though there was), and turning the Chrysler back toward Detroit. Two thousand miles.
The problem was, Charley said—which was why I needed to be careful and would be an idiot not to be—Arthur had turned bitter and moody and sinister feeling and even more chaos-minded at the idea of strangers showing up and knowing who he was and what he’d done, and having the intention to haul him back across the border to face everything he’d failed at. His father was still alive. His future was squandered. His past bad judgments were waiting. Arthur did not possess a calm state of mind, Charley said. He lacked the mental ability not to incriminate himself. Incrimination had become his whole life. These were the changes to his behavior that should’ve been apparent to me, but weren’t.
He’d been up here all the years, Charley said, expecting someone to come and find him—suffering and waiting. A life lived in a wind-deviled, empty-vista’d town—alienated, remote, family-less; only Box, then Charley, then Florence, as companions. And now me. How had he been able to stay? I wondered this later on. The towering weather, the endless calendar, the featureless days, the unfamiliar made permanent. Impossible, any person would think. It was the “better question” Remlinger hadn’t answered when we were in the Modern Café. He’d adapted, as he told me.
But it had turned him the way he was. Eccentric. Impatient. Regretful. Slightly deranged. Violent with frustration. Living a fragment of a life he couldn’t give up. (He would’ve given it up if he’d had the nerve or the imagination to travel to an even more foreign place where he could again hide.) Charley, by way of dismissing him, said Arthur still saw himself as the smart, naive young student who’d never meant to kill anybody, and who’d suffered because he had—by accident and stupidity—but who wanted his punishment to be over, since his punishment had become his life.
“You,” Charley said. We were passing the Fort Royal town limits sign, the low buildings, plus the Leonard—an enlarging dot on the prairie—the dusty main street uncongested now that the cold had started (pickup trucks left idling at the curb, the flags at the post office and the bank rattling in the wind, bundled Fort Royal residents keeping nearer the sides of buildings than the street). “You can’t blab any of this. Not to A.R. And not to Flo. I’ll skin you out raw.” What he’d told me (he said again) was a warning so I would set my limits and “protect” myself from what happened if “certain events” worked out different from how they were supposed to. Charley had obviously given thought to these events but didn’t describe them, so I didn’t try to imagine them.
What I was thinking though, as we drove down Main Street, was about the two Americans on their way out from Detroit. My father said that in Detroit everyone had a good-paying job and security. It was the American melting pot. The power center. Coat of many colors. It draws the whole world to itself, he said. “Detroit makes, the world takes.” Etc. These men driving out were from there and were coming to find out true things and champion them. I had never been in Detroit, but I had an interest in it from being born in Oscoda, not so far north of there. A person can have these views and ideas, but have no real experience with them whatsoever.
“Why would I be involved?” I said. I’d become bolder by then and had gotten over being shocked. We were pulling to a stop at the Leonard’s small front door, over which LOBBY was painted in black. Wind buffeted the truck windows. I stared at Charley’s peculiar, knobby, still-rouged profile. A dwarf’s face, but a larger,
strenuous body.
“If you’re lucky, you won’t be,” he said. His big meaty lips made a hard pooched-out shape, like a kiss, that meant he was thinking. “If you were smart, you’d take the money you’ve been hoarding and get on the bus. Get off someplace near the border and slip across and never let yourself be seen again. If you stay here, you’re just a point of reference for him, part of his strategy. He doesn’t care a nickel what happens to you. He’s just trying to prove something.”
“They’d catch me and send me back to the juvenile home,” I said.
“I’d have done better in the home,” Charley said. “You always think you know the worst thing. But it’s never the very worst thing.”
He meant I’d do better to go back to Great Falls, walk into the police station and admit I was the missing Dell Parsons, and let it all focus down on me: be put in a locked room with bars for windows, staring through at a frozen landscape waiting for nothing to happen until I was eighteen. That had seemed like the worst to my mother. It still seemed the worst to me. I didn’t have an answer back to Charley. I almost never did. He only knew about himself. But I knew, for me, what was worst—no matter what happened with Arthur Remlinger. And no matter what happened to me as a point of reference, which I understood to mean that I would just be part of a whim, and be forgotten when it was over.
Charley didn’t want me to say anything else. He didn’t listen to me more than he had to. I climbed out of his old truck onto the gritty, windy Fort Royal street and closed his door. “Most losers are self-made men,” he said as it shut. “Don’t forget that.” I didn’t say anything. He drove away, then, leaving me there to my future.
Chapter 59
I was in the little lobby of the Leonard—the same afternoon Charley had told me about Remlinger earlier in the morning—when the two Americans arrived. The Leonard didn’t have a legitimate lobby—just a square, dim entry room at the bottom of the center stairs, where a front desk was set up with a bell and a lamp and a row of key hooks on the wall. I’d eaten lunch and was on my way to go to sleep. I’d been up at four and would have to scout geese in the evening. Charley had made me think the Americans would be arriving soon, and I had it in mind to see them, had pictured what they’d look like, and had tried to pass through the lobby as often as possible. But I hadn’t thought they’d be arriving that day.
They were registering in with Mrs. Gedins, who’d been doing her kitchen duties and heard the bell. She barely spoke to the men. Though when each of them pronounced his name—Raymond Jepps, Louis Crosley—she looked up from the registry book, her swimming Swedish eyes stern and distrusting, as if there was something untruthful about Americans and no one could fool her.
They each had a leather suitcase. And since I was sometimes required to take the Sports’ luggage to their rooms, for which I’d be given a quarter, I stood by the wall with the picture of Queen Elizabeth on it and waited. Mrs. Gedins told them the two of them would be sleeping in the Overflow House (my shack), because the hotel was full. (It wasn’t.) She’d arrange for Charley to take them when they were ready. This was the first indication that what Charley had told me was correct: that the two men had come from the States, that they’d been identified and were expected. I’d halfway believed the story was untrue—something Charley had cooked up for his own fantastical reasons to frighten me. But the two Americans announced names they’d been predicted to have—Jepps and Crosley. They said they were from “The motor city”—in the States. They were in good spirits and made no effort to disguise who they were. They seemed to have no idea anyone would recognize them or know why they were in Fort Royal. It’s possible even Mrs. Gedins knew who they were, so that everyone knew, except the Americans themselves.
“We’re going out to the west coast of Canada,” Jepps, the older one, the former policeman, said with a smile. He was red-faced and wore a toupee made of some slick black hair material that sat up on his round head and looked not the least natural. It imparted an air of foolishness to him, because he was short and round and wore his trousers pulled up over his belly, and had on brown wing-tip shoes that looked as big as a clown’s. He didn’t say what they intended to do on the west coast of Canada. Crosley was younger and well groomed, with precise, sharpened features and short, black, barbered hair. He smiled a lot also; but his eyes were alert to here and there, and he was darker complexioned. He wore a gold ring on his little finger that he twisted at nervously, as if he was putting on being jovial. Later, when Jepps had been shot and was dead on the floor of my shack and I was terrified but nonetheless involved in moving him, I had to pick up his toupee, which was an awful thing to do. (It had come loose from his head when he was shot.) I hadn’t seen a toupee before, but recognized it. I was surprised at how flimsy it was, and small. It ended up in the burn drum, with the goose entrails and feathers.
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 i
t 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.
