Medicine River

by Thomas King

  “Ray says there are hundreds of businesses that give away calendars every year. You know, Will, like the banks or the auto-supply stores. A lot of those businesses are always saying how much they appreciate Indian people. Ray figures you can sell the calendars in blocks of, say, five hundred for the small businesses, one thousand for the mediumsized companies and two thousand for the oil companies and the government. What do you think, Will?”

  “Beats another bake sale.”

  “That’s the spirit, Will. Ray wants you to do the photography work. I told Ray what a great photographer you are, and he said, sure, might as well give the business to one of our own people. He’s got a lot of respect for you, Will.”

  I told Harlen it wouldn’t be cheap, that that kind of photography with colour separations and everything was going to be expensive. And then there would be printing costs.

  “Not to worry, Will. Ray figures we can maybe get a grant to pay for most of the costs. That way there won’t be any risk. Louise is going to do the accounting, and Elwood has a friend in Winnipeg who owns a press.”

  “Am I doing this for costs?”

  “No, Will. Ray said that was bad business. He said to make sure you add in for your time.”

  “What’s Ray going to do?”

  “He’s going to be in charge. Ray’s got the brains for this kind of thing. We’re driving over to Calgary next week to talk with the oil companies. Figure while we’re in the city, we can look at basketball uniforms, too.”

  “Uniforms?”

  “Sure. Big John said some of the money could go to the team. There might even be enough for new shoes and socks and stuff like that.”

  Ray stopped by the studio the following week. He wanted cost estimates on the photography work. He was dressed in a good-looking dark blue suit, and he didn’t waste any time on words.

  “Could mean a lot of money for the centre. We need a top-quality product. The big companies don’t buy second-rate stuff. You know what I mean?”

  I said that I did, and I said I’d get an estimate to him the first of the week. His Lincoln was parked on Third. I could see it through the window.

  The cost was over five thousand dollars, and with my time, it came to almost six thousand. Ray came by with a folder with twelve photographs in it, dropped it on my desk, and said, “Do it.”

  Three months later, we had our calendar, and it looked good. The first print run was ten thousand. The second run was twenty thousand, and according to Harlen, they were all gone in two months.

  “Ray’s a great salesman, Will. Thirty thousand calendars. Do you know how much profit that means for the centre?”

  “No idea.”

  “Oh,” said Harlen. “Neither do I. I was hoping you knew how these things work.”

  * * *

  —

  I ONLY TOLD STRANGERS, but there was always the chance that something would get back to my mother or to James.

  “My father is a television producer.

  “My father is an investment consultant.

  “My father is a physicist.

  “My father is a computer designer.”

  I ran out of interesting professions fast, and instead of trying to top each new career I created for him, I began to imagine long and elaborate stories that I could tell again and again, adding to them as I went along.

  It was best on airplanes, where everyone was a stranger. The conversation helped to take my mind off the fact we were in the air. I even began to look forward to the next opportunity to talk about my father and slowly, over the months and years, he began to take on a particular shape, a distinctive sound.

  He was a tall man with a low, pleasant voice. I imagined him best as a free-lance journalist who roamed the world taking his own pictures and writing his stories. He had a slight limp, the result of his plane coming down in the Yucatan. (He was a pilot, too.) Most of his stories were about oppressed peoples, and he wrote about them with grace and wit. His stories had been published all over, but he generally wrote under pseudonyms because he was a shy man. You’ve probably read some of his pieces in Saturday Night, Time, or Newsweek, I told the people I met, and you didn’t even know it.

  Most of all, I liked to point out, he loved his family, and I was always getting postcards and letters with pictures of him standing against some famous place or helping women and children take sacks of rice off the back of trucks.

  There was the time in New Zealand when he spent four months around Rotorura living with a group of Maoris. He had taken over five hundred pictures for National Geographic and had written a superb piece on traditional and contemporary Maori life, how the two flowed into each other, how the culture continued to maintain itself in spite of the inroads that technology had made. Two days before he was to leave, a delegation of the elders came by the house where he was staying and told him that they had talked and would prefer that he didn’t put their pictures in a magazine. That evening the village had a feast, and after everyone had eaten, my father took the story he had worked on for four months and all the film and placed them on the fire.

  That was my dad.

  Then, for my twenty-seventh birthday, my mother sent me a white shirt and a photograph.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE END of the month, things were getting a little thin, and I kept hoping for the cheque to arrive. I could have called the Friendship Centre, but I didn’t want to appear anxious. By the time the fifteenth rolled around, I was closer to desperate.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Will. This Martha?”

  “Yep.”

  “You know, I was just looking over my records, and I don’t think I ever received a cheque for that calendar project. Have those cheques gone out yet?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, did my cheque go out?”

  “You have to ask Ray.”

  “It was that bill I dropped off about a month ago.”

  “Ray took all that stuff. Said he was going to take care of it.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to call Ray and ask him about my money, so I called Harlen.

  “Sure, Will,” said Harlen. “I can do that. Must have been a mix-up with the cheques. Could still be in the mail. Ray’ll be real embarrassed.”

  Harlen didn’t call back that day, and he didn’t call back the next day either. When he did call, he told me that he had been right, that Ray was real embarrassed.

  “Ray paid all the bills. But he said he didn’t see your bill in the folder Martha gave him. Said he paid everyone. What was left over went to the centre.”

  “I can send him another bill.”

  “No need to do that, Will. Ray said we could just take what you’re owed out of what the centre got.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “Boy, Ray was real embarrassed. How much was your bill?”

  “Almost six thousand dollars.”

  “That much, huh?”

  “How much did the centre get?”

  “Three hundred and forty dollars. Looks like we’re going to have to wait on the uniforms.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PHOTOGRAPH was of my father. He was leaning against a fence with four other men. He had on a pair of jeans, a work shirt and a hat that was pulled down over much of his face. There was a short letter from my mother with the photograph that said, “Happy birthday. Found this picture. Third from the right. That’s him.” And she signed it “love” like she always did. That was it. He had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. My mother had drawn a circle around him with an arrow pointing at the side of his head.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD TO TAKE a loan out with the bank. Harlen spent the next two weeks apologizing for Ray.

  “He feels awful, Will. Blames himself for what happened.”

  “What happened to all the money the centre was going to make?”

  “Expenses, Will. The expenses took a lot of the profit.”

  “Yeah, bu
t we sold, what, thirty thousand calendars?”

  “Not quite that many in the end.”

  “How many?”

  “Don’t know. Ray said it wasn’t as good as it might have been. Ray had to put in five thousand dollars of his own money.”

  “Ray lost five thousand dollars on the calendar?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So, how much did he lose?”

  I ran into Ray about a month later in the American. I had just finished work, and it was hot, and a cold beer sounded good. Ray was sitting at a table near the back. Harlen was with him.

  Ray had on his suit. He looked clean and neat sitting in the chair. “Sorry to hear you had to take out a loan,” he said. “Harlen and me figure that as soon as the money starts to come in next year, you’ll get paid first with interest. Damn, but I wish I knew what happened to that bill.”

  I guess I wasn’t smiling when I sat down. “Expenses will sure eat into the profits quick.”

  Ray wasn’t smiling either. “They sure will.”

  Ray ordered another pitcher, and I sat there staring at him until he disappeared in the smoke and the noise of the evening.

  * * *

  —

  MY MOTHER NORMALLY sent me a shirt for my birthday. She sent shirts at Christmas, too. Generally, they were used, shirts she had found at yard sales. Sometimes they were new. New or used, she would wash them, iron them, and pin them up in a neat rectangle. She didn’t make a distinction between new and used. There were clean shirts and dirty shirts, and that was it. She never missed my birthday.

  She had pinned the photograph to the shirt pocket. “That’s him,” the letter said, as if knowing was an important thing for me to have.

  7

  After a six-year courtship and a four-month pregnancy, Jonnie Prettywoman and Cecil Broadman got married. Cecil’s parents were Catholic in a reasonable sort of way and were pleased that the ceremony was performed before they had to make plans for the baby’s baptism. Bud Prettywoman hired me to take the pictures. It was a large wedding, just friends and relatives, and Jonnie wasn’t showing at all, which is probably one of the reasons that both sets of parents were smiling at each other like toothpaste advertisements.

  The wheat had been good that year, and the tables at the reception were stacked with food. Frankie Greysquirrel and Eddie Weaselhead were home in bed with the flu, but Floyd and Elwood and the rest of the boys on the team were there, and for the first five or six hours, they floated around the tables like a flock of crows.

  “Hope you boys like the food,” Bud told Floyd and Elwood, as they stood by the main table with a sandwich in each hand, a beer stuck in their jacket pocket and a mouthful of food. I got a candid shot of the three of them, Bud smiling with his thumbs tucked into his shiny cummerbund and Floyd and Elwood staring blankly into the camera with thin pieces of ham and cheese hanging out the sides of their mouths.

  The reception was about halfway over when I noticed that Harlen wasn’t there.

  I caught Big John Yellow Rabbit at the punch bowl. “John, have you seen Harlen?”

  John looked around the room once. “Harlen not here?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “That’s strange, Will. Can’t imagine Harlen missing this.”

  Neither could I. Harlen went to everything. He went to all the powwows. He went to all the funerals. He went to all the weddings, the births, and most of the court cases. Any time there was a gathering of two or more Indians in a hundred-mile radius of Medicine River, chances were one of them was Harlen.

  “Cecil’s Harlen’s cousin, isn’t he?” said John.

  Which was another reason that Harlen wouldn’t miss the wedding.

  The reception didn’t break up until almost nine that night. Cecil and Jonnie left about six, but nobody missed them. Floyd and Elwood and the rest of the boys stopped floating about seven, and there was actually some food left. Bertha and Mary and Betty wrapped it up and gave it to some of the families.

  “Real fine wedding, Will.” Bud Prettywoman had taken off his bow-tie and loosened up his shirt. The cummerbund was riding up over his belly, and it looked as though he was wearing a flat inner tube around his chest. “Bet you got some real good shots.”

  “Sure did,” I said. “Maybe next week I’ll have the proofs for you folks to look at.”

  “Those two wait any longer,” said Bud, fixing the deep-red tie on one of his braids, “you could have taken pictures of the baby, too.”

  Both of us laughed, and Bud handed me a beer. “Too bad about Harlen,” he said.

  “Yeah. Can’t imagine him missing the wedding. Must have had to go somewhere or something.”

  Bud sighed and sat down on the table. “Floyd didn’t tell you about Harlen?”

  “Probably too busy eating.”

  “You’re his friend, I know. Guess everybody thought you knew already.”

  “Harlen okay?”

  “You know, Will, when Harlen was a young man, he was pretty wild. Used to call him Crazy Bear.” Bud shook his head. “I can’t tell you how many times his father threw him out of the house.” Bud settled himself on top of the table.

  “Course Harlen wasn’t near as wild as Jesse Plume’s boy. You ever know David? He joined that AIM movement, went all over the States. Got himself thrown in jail in South Dakota. Wears that jacket everywhere he goes.”

  Bud paused to drink his beer.

  “And Harlen was never mean like Oxford Lefthand. You ever know his wife, Will?”

  “Oxford Lefthand’s?”

  “No, Harlen’s.”

  “No.”

  “Nice woman, Doris. Harlen settled right down when he married her. Stopped drinking just like that. Not like Bennett Chase. You know Bennett, don’t you? Bennett married that white woman from down in Santa Fe. Met her when he was a student at that Indian art school. She had money, you know. Didn’t stop Bennett from drinking. He just drank better stuff….Bennett’s father used to make his own liquor. Did you ever know Peter Chase?”

  “What happened to Harlen?”

  “Well, you know Doris got herself killed in a car accident. Happened near Banff. Real sad that. Harlen took to drinking again. Drank pretty heavy. Almost killed himself. Did something to his stomach. Doc Calavano told him next time he drank like that, he wouldn’t have to worry about sobering up.”

  Bud leaned back and looked out across the empty room and settled into the story about how Harlen took up hard drinking and how he almost killed himself. Harlen always did this to me. I wondered if he had learned it from Bud.

  “You had to know Harlen when he was young…” Bud began.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD FIRST MET Harlen years ago when my mother died. I was living in Toronto at the time. My brother James called, and I caught the first plane to Calgary. It was evening when I arrived in Medicine River. James met me at the airport. His eyes were red, and his hair was greasy and matted. I wanted to do something, but we both just stood there. Finally, he grabbed my bag and threw it in the trunk.

  There were quite a few people at the funeral. All my mother’s brothers came with their wives, and Auntie Claire and her three girls were there. There was a tall man I didn’t recognize who kept smiling at me. He was all chest, perched on long, thin legs. His hands were stuck in his pockets, his elbows turned out like wings. From a distance, he looked like a stork. The priest stood across from James and me, leaning into the wind, his garments trailing out behind him as though he were preparing to fly. He had to shout to be heard over the warm, rolling wind, and there were tears in his eyes. Near the end of the service, he raised one hand towards the sky and extended a single finger as if to mark a spot, and in that instant, his gown billowing around, his head cocked to one side, he reminded me of Mary Poppins.

  After the service, James asked me if I would mind catching a ride back to Medicine River with a friend of his. “I need to get away for a bit, Will. I’ll stop by later and take you t
o the airport.” James waved to the stork, and Harlen Bigbear glided into my life.

  “Hi,” said Harlen, “James said you need a ride back to town. You smoke?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  “James smokes,” said Harlen, “so you never know.”

  Harlen had an old green-and-white 1955 Ford sedan, and we drove to Medicine River with the windows rolled down and the radio going.

  “James tells me you been living in Toronto. Big city?”

  “Pretty good size.”

  “I never been to Toronto. Many Indians live there?”

  “Some.”

  “Many Blackfoot?”

  “No,” I said. “Mostly Cree and Ojibway.”

  “You like it there in Toronto?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “James said you went there to get away.”

  “Wanted to be a photographer.”

  “That’s a good thing to do,” Harlen said. “I should have done that.”

  “Photography?”

  “No. Get away.”

  “My job’s in Toronto.”

  Harlen turned the radio down a bit. “Can’t see Ninastiko from Toronto,” he said. “So, when you think you’ll be moving back home?”

  “Here?”

  “Sure. Most of us figured that, with your mother and all, you’d be coming home soon.”

  There was no logic to it, but my stomach tightened when Harlen said home.

  “James says you take pictures. People pay you for doing that?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “You take the pictures of all those disasters that you see in the newspapers?”

  “No, I take pictures of people mostly. Weddings, portraits, things like that.”

  “That’s good. We got a lot of people out here but not many disasters. You could start your own business, you know.”