Unfortunately just enough of my mind was still functioning to make me realize that though she’d now revealed with a flourish the mystery of her parentage, she was still mostly a puzzlement. She had said nothing about Billy Whitefoot, where he’d come to play his part in her life. She’d ignored the story of Larry Blankenship. Yet they were there, gentlemen of indistinct proportions, mute in the past. I could see them, I kept signaling to them, but I couldn’t make them hear.
I was back to the facts of what I knew. Rita had been employed by the club members and Rita had been Kim’s surrogate mother. And Rita had gone to the lodge one winter night and never been heard from again. And the members of the hunting and fishing club had taken care of the little girl when she’d come to the city. She owed something to those men who had reached out to a frightened, north country girl with no place to go … But did she really? Did she ever owe anybody anything? It didn’t seem to be in her makeup. She kept even, she never fell behind when it came to her debts.
Later, in bed with The Baseball Encyclopedia and the career of Hank Sauer, who had become the Cubs’ big home-run hitter after Bill Nicholson had been shipped to Philly, I got to thinking about the disconnected, random selection of people and events which make up the grid of one’s life. All those Cubs I’d watched as a kid, they’d come from all over the country, from dozens of Depression backgrounds, and entertained me at Wrigley Field, where you could smell the greenery of the vines on the walls in the outfield.
What had happened that day in the lobby was much the same thing. A man I’d never known commits suicide and the event develops a hungry life of its own, reaching out ravenously to consume whomever it touched. Harriet, Tim, the club members … Rita and Carver and old Ted. And Kim. If Larry Blankenship hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d never have met Kim. It was a bond, like a muscle, flexing, pulling us together. I felt close to her and, through her, to all the points at which she was bound to the pattern …
To Larry by marriage; to Harriet by hate; to Tim through his sense of responsibility; to Rita by her mother’s blood; to Ted by chance; to Billy by marriage; to Darwin by lust; to Anne by friendship; to Ole by love and caring; to the members of the club by fate.
To me … by what?
It made a hell of a list. Great for an old-timers’ game. Maybe I could throw out the first ball. Finally I went to sleep.
I woke up lonely and cold, badly in need of some human companionship. I resisted the faint desire to call Kim. She needed plenty of room. I hoped that she had some thinking to do about her own life, about Ole; but in the morning light I was unsure of her. There was the nagging fear that she didn’t take me so seriously, that we were on different wave-lengths like Chekhovian characters rattling on to each other in our own private worlds, neither hearing the other.
I packed my suitcase and went outside to find a brisk, clear morning with heavy dew lingering in the grass. The Chat and Chew Cafe was steaming with eggs and bacon, several locals fueling up for the day, glad to see the sun hanging in a pale-blue sky above the lake. Dolly smiled at me when I came through the door and I sat down next to my friend Jack, the cop.
“You must figure I do nothin’ but eat,” he growled. “And you wouldn’t be too damn far wrong. Har, har, siddown, siddown, you find your daddy’s place all right?”
I nodded, ordered the ranch breakfast, which included a steak and hashbrowns as well as eggs, the works. Hot coffee perked me up.
“Y’know, ever since I was talking to you the other day, I been thinking about what I said, about Ted and Rita, the two kids—”
“What about the kids?”
“Well, there was the boy, he was older, course, and he was their natural child, or so everybody said.” He mopped up some egg with a corner of toast, leaving a yellow stain on his lower lip. “Well, I shouldn’t say that because a lot of people figured that maybe it was someone else who put that particular bun in Rita’s oven, not old Ted … but, what the hell, Rita and old Ted said it was their own, and what harm was there in that? Officially the boy was theirs. Robert, Robert Hook, that was the boy’s name. Real fat kid, eyes just like raisins in a rice pudding, always looked like he was peeking outa that fat face. Real quiet kid, always had his head down, looking at the sidewalk. Funny, the dumb stuff you remember, ain’t it?
“And then there was the girl. I reckon Rita was real close to that sister of hers, down there in the Windy City, Chicago. She musta been gone, aw hell, six months taking care of her down there … you know how sisters are sometimes. I had a pair of sisters, kinda unhealthy, they was so close. Anyway, she came home with the little baby girl, Shirley … just a tiny baby. Then once Rita took off and Ted was in bad shape, he sent ’em out to the orphanage …
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What is this Shirley thing? I thought the girl’s name was Kim?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, you know the family, then?”
“No, I just happen to know the girl … Kim.”
“Well, you’re right about that, but they didn’t name girls Kim back in those days, see. Little Shirley decided she’d become Kim once she was gone. When she came back to town, years later, hell, she was all growed up, one of them damned teenagers, and she was Kim by then … made sure we all got it right, too. So we called her Kim Hook, but she’d taken another last name—I forget.” He looked at my plate. “Eat up, for God’s sake, your steak’s gettin’ cold. She still visits Ted, I hear, little Shirley.” He watched me go to work on the steak and eggs. “Look, though, here’s my point. I got to thinking about our little chat with Dolly the other day and I was reminiscing with a couple of the boys havin’ a beer the way you do, y’now, and somebody remembered something about the Indian guide I told you about … Running Buck?”
Dolly stopped to listen, sweat beaded on her brow, still smelling of powder. Two girls were bearing the brunt of the serving and she rested a fat arm on the pie cabinet, blew on a hot cup of coffee. She listened attentively, eyes flickering away at her clientele.
I said, “The man who took Rita out to the lodge that last night.”
“Well, this guide had a kid with him most of the time, kid was ’bout the only person he ever hung around with or said more ’n two words to. Me and my memory, I can’t recollect the kid’s name—”
“I remember the boy,” Dolly interrupted, eyebrows knit as if on the verge of a discovery. “But I can’t get his name either. Anyway, he must of been Running Buck’s son, wouldn’t you expect?”
“Funny thing is,” Jack said, pausing for emphasis, chins quivering over his open-necked blue policeman’s shirt, “the kid’s still in these parts, that’s what I remembered whilst we was having a beer! Hell, he come back after going down to the Cities for a spell but he didn’t stay long, went off to college somewhere, Mankato or St. Cloud, anyway now he’s running the Indian Affairs Center up in Jasper, up on the Range …”
“Running Buck’s boy,” Dolly said. “Sure is funny the way people turn out, ain’t it? Who’d a thought it?”
“I figured I oughta tell you, seein’ as how you turned up here for breakfast.” Jack scowled in thought. “If you’re interested in the club, the boy might be able to fill you in on some details, your father and his friends. He used to help Running Buck, I’m sure he worked out there at the lodge from time to time … doing errands, odd jobs.” He drained his coffee cup and covered it with his hand.
“Where’s Jasper?” I asked.
“North and west of here, not too far from the border. Ely, Coleraine, Hibbing, Virginia, Jasper, they’re all up there together.” He gave me directions and I finished my breakfast, listening to him ramble on. “Once you get there, go to the center and just ask for the director, name just on the tip of my tongue—anyway, he must be So-and-So Running Buck, don’t you see? I don’t know.”
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.
11
JASPER 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.”
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 22
