by Thomas King
By the time Alberta arrived in Blossom, it was too late to drive out to the reserve. Another hour over two-lane roads in the dark was not the way she wanted to finish her evening. As she followed the off ramp, Alberta could see the big square sign for the Blossom Lodge. The only parking spot was next to an old red car that was tilted to the side at a funny angle. When she got out, she saw that one of its tires was flat. Even more annoying, there was a small lake around the car, and Alberta had to walk all the way out to the curb in order to get back to the lobby.
“I’d like a room for the night.”
“Mr. and Mrs.?”
“No, a room for one.”
The desk clerk looked over his glasses at Alberta.
“As I recall, you have a university discount,” she continued.
“And does the lady work at a university?”
Alberta pulled out her university identification card and her driver’s license.
The desk clerk smiled and handed her cards back to her.“You can’t always tell by looking,” he said.
“How true it is,” said Alberta. “I could have been a corporate executive.”
* * *
The receptionist at the clinic had been almost as unctuous.
Option four.
Artificial insemination.
When Alberta was small, she had seen cows artificially inseminated. There was nothing wrong with it, she guessed, for cows, but even there it had seemed . . . mechanical. The thought of crawling up on a table and putting her behind in the air while some doctor fiddled with a hose made her furious. She wasn’t even sure that that was how they did it with humans, reasoned that it was not. But she remained skeptical and unconvinced, even by the articles that she was able to find on the subject, which dwelt, for the most part, on the successes and the failures and not the process itself. All that changed after the night she had stood across the street from the Shagganappi Lounge and watched the lights change.
But having made the decision, Alberta discovered she had no exact idea how to go about it. So one Saturday, greatly comforted by the fact that she could do the preliminary gathering of information by phone, Alberta sat down with the Yellow Pages and looked up artificial insemination.
Cows. Cows.
Horses.
Cows. Horses.
Cows. Cows.
“Does the lady have a major credit card?”
Alberta put her card on the desk.
“Does the lady have a car?”
“The blue Nissan parked next to the red thing.”
“And does the lady require any help with her bags?”
Alberta smiled and leaned forward on the counter.
By the time she got to her room, Alberta was sorry she had been so rude. At least the room was pleasant. Alberta flopped down on the queen-size bed, stacked the pillows under her head, let her shoes drop off her feet, picked up the remote control, and aimed it at the blank screen. Then she got up, went to the bathroom, and flossed her teeth.
The next thing Alberta did was to call the general number for the Calgary hospital.
“Information.”
“Yes. Could you transfer me to the Artificial Insemination Department.”
The woman on the other end of the phone didn’t say anything for a moment, and Alberta hoped she was running her finger down the directory, looking in the A’s.
“Please hold,” said the woman.
“Gynecology.”
After that, Alberta got Obstetrics, and after that, Pediatrics. And after that, the main switchboard.
“Information.”
“Ah . . . Artificial Insemination?”
“Please hold.”
“Gynecology.”
But the call hadn’t been a total waste of time. As she hung up the phone, Alberta realized that the best place to start was probably with her own gynecologist. Dr. Mary Takai was a short Japanese woman, and while they were not exactly friends, they had, over the years, developed a professional relationship, and more important, Alberta felt comfortable talking with her.
“So that’s the situation,” Alberta said after she had explained her dilemma to Mary.
“Ah,” said Dr. Takai.
“Given the options, I think that artificial insemination would be the best.”
“Let me make some calls.”
Alberta read the newspaper while Mary called Edmonton and several clinics in Calgary. “Okay,” she said, “I have good news and I have bad news.”
“Bad news?”
“Most of the clinics won’t take single women. I think it’s a question of morals.”
“Morals?”
“One clinic will take single women. But you have to get a letter from me testifying to your physical health, your mental health, and your morals.”
“Morals?”
“In the first instance, they figure that if you’re not married, you’re not trying. In the second instance, they figure that if you’re not married but trying hard, you’re not the kind of person they want to associate with.”
“I just want a child. I don’t want a husband.”
“The Bennett Clinic in Edmonton.” Mary wrote down the address and the phone number.
“Edmonton? Isn’t there something in Calgary?”
“Foothills isn’t taking any new patients. I’ll write the letter today and you should hear from them in about six to eight months.”
“Six to eight months?”
Mary smiled and crossed her legs. “It takes most couples longer than that just to get pregnant.”
Alberta lay on the bed and touched the remote control. An old Western. Alberta changed to the next channel. Nothing. The next channel. Nothing. And the next. Before she knew it, she was back to the Western.
What men saw in these kinds of movies was beyond her. This one featured a white woman who was being held captive by Indians. Alberta watched the screen and thought about what she should get Lionel for his birthday. A book was the obvious answer, but Lionel, so far as she knew, didn’t read. He could use a new jacket. That horrible gold thing that Bill Bursum made him wear was hideous enough in the context of the store, but Lionel insisted on wearing it on dates. She could always call Latisha in the morning, maybe even drop in for breakfast, and see if she had any ideas.
It was nine months before Alberta heard anything from the Bennett Clinic, and what she got was a form letter welcoming her interest in the services of the Bennett Clinic, a twenty-four-page form to fill out, and a chart on which she was to plot her body temperature and her periods for the next four months.
The woman who answered the phone was very friendly.
“Hi,” said Alberta. “I just got a letter from your clinic—”
“And you’re wondering why you have to wait another four months to get this thing rolling.”
“Ah . . . well, yes.”
“Everybody wants to know that. It’s a real pain, isn’t it.”
“Well, inconvenient, I guess.”
“I know just how you feel. You’re probably regular as clockwork, eh?”
“Well, yes, I am. But I guess I don’t mind filling in the form.”
“If I got something like that, I’d be tempted to toss it out and forget the whole thing.”
“No, no. I don’t mind filling it out at all.”
By the time Alberta got off the phone, the sweat was pouring down the sides of her breasts. That evening, she filled in all the questions.
Do you have frequent intercourse?
Are your periods painful?
Have you ever taken drugs?
Is there any mental illness in your family?
And later that month, when she started spotting, Alberta taped the chart to the wall and put a thermometer next to her bed.
The movie had run on ahead without her. Now the white woman was in love with the Indian chief and the soldiers were coming to rescue her. Just the sort of thing that Li
onel and Charlie would like. As Alberta watched, the chief, a tall man with a muscular chest and a large nose, sent the woman back to the fort and prepared to ambush the soldiers at the river.
Two months after Alberta sent in the questionnaire and the chart, another woman from the clinic called to tell her she was a blue priority patient and that they would call her for an interview as soon as they had an opening.
“Interview?”
“That’s right. All of our patients have to see one of our staff psychologists. It’s a rule.”
“Blue priority?”
“It’s based on age. Younger women get higher priority. You can see why.”
“I’m not sure—”
“And when you get the interview, make sure your husband comes with you. We can’t begin the interview process unless both the husband and the wife are here.”
“I’m not married.”
“A lot of people make that mistake.”
“I’m sure.”
“The women come and the men stay home.”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“And then we have to start all over again.”
Alberta readjusted the pillows and pulled the blankets around her shoulders. Lionel’s birthday. What Lionel really needed, Alberta concluded as she fiddled with the remote control under the covers, was some help with his life. It had sort of drifted away from him. Lionel wasn’t pushy and slick like Charlie. He was sincere and dull. And when she thought about it, Alberta wasn’t sure that there was anything in between. Maybe all men were like that, Charlies and Lionels. Or worse. Maybe, in the end, they all turned into Amoses, standing in the dark, angry, their pants down around their ankles.
Charlie couldn’t sleep. He rolled around in bed for an hour, rearranging the pillows, adjusting the blankets. Finally he sat up and turned on the lamp. There were color bars on channels two, four, and eleven, static on channel twenty-eight, and a Western on twenty-six.
Charlie shoved all the pillows behind his back so he could see the screen without having to sit up. A Western. The long flight down to save Alberta from herself. The mix-up with the car. Insomnia. And now a Western.
Lillian was three months pregnant when Portland packed everything in a pickup, and they came home from Hollywood. They stayed at Lillian’s mother’s place until after Charlie was born, and Portland went to work for the band council. Those were good years. Charlie and his cousins ruled the prairies, and if Portland missed the glamour of Hollywood, he didn’t say. He stayed busy organizing tours, doing slide shows, writing articles for the travel magazines, and on the weekends he showed his son and the rest of the kids how to mount a horse without a saddle, how to ride bareback using just the mane and your hands, how to drop to the side of the horse so you couldn’t be seen. How to fall off.
Charlie was fifteen when his mother got sick. He could remember her being sick. The trips to the hospital, the jars of pills, the machine next to his mother’s bed that sounded as though it were breathing. But by the time he realized just how sick she was, she was dead.
A week after they buried Lillian, Portland stopped going to work.
At first, he simply stayed at the house and fixed things—the water pump, the fence, the door on the barn. Then he stopped fixing things and began to watch television. He would sit in the chair and flip through the channels, never watching any program for very long. Except for the Westerns.
“That one was on last week, Dad.”
“I played a small part in that movie, but they cut it out.”
“What else is on?”
“That’s C. B. Cologne, Charlie. That Italian friend of mine I told you about. He got most of the good Indian parts in those days.”
“What else is on?”
“You know what the C. B. stands for? You’ll laugh. Crystal Ball. It was a perfume his mother was crazy about.”
One afternoon, Charlie came home and found his father packing the pickup. Charlie stood at the gate and watched his father stuff a large suitcase into the camper.
“If you could go anywhere in the world,” his father said, looking up in the sky, “where would you want to go?”
“What happens if I guess right?”
“Go ahead.” Portland stood by the pickup, his hands stuck in the back pockets of his jeans. He had on his good boots. His hair was combed, and he had shaved. “Where would you want to go?”
Charlie wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere, but as he looked at his father standing there, shifting his weight back and forth, smiling, Charlie knew the answer his father wanted to hear.
“Anywhere in the whole world,” his father said.
“Hollywood?” said Charlie.
Charlie adjusted one of the pillows. He was sure he had seen the Western before. But after watching so many of them with his father, they all just ran together. There was a white woman in this one and an Indian chief and soldiers, and they ran around and shot at each other. Charlie recognized John Wayne, and one of the character actors was a man his father had known. The plot was boring, the acting dull, and Charlie was not any sleepier than before.
Lionel and Alberta. Lionel was his cousin, but even with the benefit of kinship, and allowing that women saw things in men that other men could not, Charlie was still at a loss to understand why Alberta would want to be seen with Lionel.
Charlie was better looking. It wasn’t even close. Charlie had the better job, the better education. He made more money. Drove a better car. Better clothes. Better, better, better. Charlie rolled up on his side and turned the sound off. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
All the way down through Montana and Idaho, Oregon and northern California, Portland retold the story about how he and Lillian had made their way to Los Angeles and into the movies. Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, Polly Hantos, Sammy Hearne, Johnny Cabot, Henry Cortez, C. B. Cologne, Barry Zannos, friends and rivals, a tight community of Mexicans, Italians, Greeks, along with a few Indians, some Asians, and whites, all waiting in the shadows of the major studios, working as extras, fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again.
They stopped at a service station just outside Los Angeles. Portland slipped into the phone booth, dropped a dime in the slot, and dialed a number. Charlie had never seen so many cars, so much traffic. As they had come farther south, the traffic had increased, until now it was a steady flow, like a stream or a large river.
“Charlie,” his father shouted, “you got a quarter?” Portland stood just outside the booth, the phone dangling from his hand. “It costs a quarter now. Would you believe it? When me and your mother were here, it was a dime.”
“There sure are a lot of cars.”
“You’re going to love it here, Charlie. With your looks, you may even become a bigger star than me.”
Charlie could hear the big trucks as they hissed across the overpass in the dark. There was a green highway sign in the distance, but it was too far away to read. Above the freeway lights and the headlights of the traffic pouring south, the sky was yellow and purple.
“Sky looks kinda funny, Dad.”
“It’ll be tough at first, but once we get rolling, nothing’s going to stop us.”
Portland winked and closed the door and the booth lit up. Charlie leaned against the truck and watched his father dial the number. There were no stars in the sky like home, and Charlie guessed it was because there were high clouds. Portland was talking to someone now, gesturing, smiling, laughing, rocking his shoulders backward and forward.
By the time Portland finished his call, Charlie had decided he wanted to go home and he told his father so.
“When are we going to go home?”
“We just got here. You’re a little homesick right now, but you’ll get over it.”
“But if I want to go home, can we?”
“Sure,” his father said. “You just say the word.” And Portland started the truck, pulled onto the freeway, and they
headed south.
That was it.
Charlie sat up in bed. His father had been right all along. Lionel was helpless. That’s what Alberta saw in him. Helplessness. It was, Charlie admitted, the one area where Lionel had him beat. Lionel was helpless. Charlie was self-sufficient. Being better was suddenly worse.
Lionel was overweight, and Alberta felt sorry for him. Lionel had a lousy job, and Alberta felt sorry for him. Lionel had a mediocre education, barely earned minimum wage, owned a twelve-year-old car, and had to wear a gold blazer. And Alberta felt sorry for him. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
C. B. Cologne and his wife, Isabella, insisted that Charlie and Portland stay in their basement.
“Rents are hell,” C. B. told Portland. “Things have changed. The whole place has gone to shit. Remember how it was?”
“It was the best.”
“Bet your sweet ass it was. You remember Frankie Drake?”
“Sure.”
“He died.”
“Shit!”
“Remember Henry Cortez? He played Montezuma in that little classic that what’s-his-name directed.”
“Me and Henry were like that.”
“Dead, too.”
Isabella went to bed at two. Charlie curled up on the couch and listened to his father and C. B. catch up on the years.
“I’m sorry as hell to hear about Lillian. Me and Isabella loved her, you know. Christ, you should have called. If I’d known, we’d of come up for the funeral.”
“I need to get some work, C. B. Get back in the swing. Who’s doing the Westerns these days?”
“Christ, Portland, things have changed. Not like the old days. Unions, rules, more asses to kiss. Who can predict it. It ain’t like the old days at all. Hell, you don’t even have to act anymore.”
Act helpless. And Lionel didn’t have to act. Charlie wasn’t sure he could act as helpless as Lionel looked. Of course, there was the Pinto.
That was pretty helpless. Just seeing Charlie in that wreck should be enough to sweep Alberta off her feet.
Charlie laughed at the idea. In the old days, a man would bring in horses or perform brave deeds to impress the woman he loved. Now courtship had been reduced to displays of incompetence and junk cars.
