The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  I apologized for inconveniencing him and slunk away.

  The following evening I hid in the washroom of the museum. Feeling like a fool, I stood on a toilet seat when the security guard checked the washroom at closing time. After waiting a suitable length of time I took the hammer and chisel that Allan had instructed me to bring and made my way to the urn.

  Ever so carefully I worked at chipping the two small figurines from the face of the urn. I deliberately released Viveca first, placed her gently in the side pocket of my suit, then went to work to free Allan. As I had his figure nearly liberated, my chisel slipped ever so slightly and the urn cracked and split into a number of pieces. I managed to catch Allan as the urn disintegrated. Remarkably, his only injury was a very small piece broken from his right foot.

  Regardless of what the security guard told the police, it was not me who was screaming and cursing incoherently. At the sound of the urn breaking and Allan screaming in his tiny voice, the security guard ran into the exhibit area. He said something original like, “What’s going on here?” Then he drew his pistol and pointed it very unsteadily at me. I bent over and placed Allan among the ruins of the urn. “You had better put up your hands,” said the guard as he advanced on me. I complied.

  “Come over here with me so I can watch you while I call the police,” he said, pointing to a desk and chairs a few yards distant. He looked at me closely. “You’re the man who was talking to the urn.” He was about 60, pink-cheeked, with a military haircut and a small white moustache like a skiff of snow below his nose. On his dark blue uniform he wore a name tag: Charles Stoddard—Security.

  “Dear Charles,” I said. “You are of another world.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After the fall

  The day after I was first arrested I stayed home from work. It was the first day I had missed in eight years. I told my son I had gotten drunk and fallen against the urn and that I had no idea why I was in the museum. He looked at me skeptically for he knows that I virtually never drink. My lawyer, the one who I called to post bail for me the previous night, insisted at the time I submit to a breath analysis. My blood-alcohol reading was 0.00%.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Putting a cloud in a suitcase

  They are holding Viveca as evidence. I was searched at the police station after my arrest. I'm afraid I made rather a fool of myself.

  “It’s a religious object,” I wailed. “You can’t deny me my religion.”

  “Looks like a piece of the vase he busted,” said a young cop. He was built like a middle guard and looked like a teenager. The whole police force was very young.

  “Be brave, Viveca,” I said to her as I passed her to the police officer. I could feel her pulse beating very rapidly. The middle guard slipped her into an envelope and licked the flap with a beefy tongue.

  I demanded that he leave air holes in the envelope. I’m afraid I may have become a little hysterical about it. Reluctantly he took a pen and poked a few holes in the envelope.

  “You’re not going to put her in a safe! You mustn’t put her in an airtight place of any kind.” I tried to remain composed, but my voice was quite out of control.

  “Trust me, Mr. Bristow,” the officer said.

  “You can call a lawyer now,” the man on the desk informed me, then turning to one of the officers, said, “It must be a full moon. They come out from under their rocks whenever there’s a full moon.”

  The moment I got home I taped open the mail slot and made the other preparations I have described. While the security guard was phoning the police, Allan limped from the display area to the far wall, and while the deceased urn was being examined and I was being handcuffed and led out of the museum he slipped along the baseboard and out the front doors. I can only assume that he will try to make his way back to my home. It doesn’t seem reasonable that he will go anywhere else, for it will be very difficult for a four-inch-tall plaster figure about ⅜ of an inch thick to get much attention from anyone who does not believe in him. Allan gave me so many instructions that after my arrest they all seemed to have blurred and merged with the actual conversations I had with Allan and Viveca. I do seem to recall him saying that after his removal from the urn he would require nourishment, but I can’t be certain. I put out food and water just in case.

  Now that I’m willing to tell the truth I find it would be easier to stuff a cloud into a suitcase than to get anyone to take me seriously. I pleaded with my lawyer to have Viveca returned to me. I told him to have the museum people check and they would find that she was not a part of the broken urn. He promised he would look into it but from the tone of his voice I could tell he was humouring me. From the hospital I phoned the museum director and pleaded with him to view the piece of evidence the police were holding. I insisted that he compare it with photographs of the urn. I’m afraid I may have become a little hysterical again. He took no action, I suppose considering the source of the call. Over the telephone I have become quite friendly with the middle guard at the police station; his name is Rourke and our families come from a similar part of Ireland. He assures me that Viveca is being kept in an airy bottom drawer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Meanwhile, back at J. W. I.

  I keep having a dream. Sometimes I have it in the daytime, therefore I suppose I would have to say it is a fantasy as well as a dream. The water dishes that I left in my house for Allan’s use are large red plastic ones. They are some four inches off the ground. Since Allan is only about four inches tall, my calculations indicate that he would have great difficulty getting a drink without falling in. I should phone my son and have him change the dishes for saucers. Yet I do not. My dream is that my son phones me to say that he has found (a) a four-inch plaster figure in Greek dress submerged in the water dish, or (b) a full-grown man of about 50, who must have had an extremely difficult time drowning himself in less than three inches of water.

  Assuming that doctors like to hear about dreams I discussed this one with them. They are not concerned because they don’t believe my original story. Their professional advice is to try not to think about it.

  The night following my first arrest I went back to the museum grounds to look for Allan. My concern was not really for Allan but that he is the only one who can release Viveca. I spent a good deal of time searching the foliage around the building and skulking about the grounds, until a greasy-looking kid with a widow’s peak, driving a Toyota with a frothing Doberman in the back seat, shone a spotlight on me. Trespassing by night. The following afternoon I was arrested for loitering about the grounds. I tried to be more careful that night but the kid with the Doberman got me again, hence my banishment to J. Walter Ives.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sayonara

  My fourteen days are up. The doctors come to say good-bye. They explain that according to their analysis of my handwriting I am perfectly sane.

  “There are other dimensions,” I assure them, “of which you are incapable of understanding. In fact . . .”

  I am interrupted by the head nurse who advises me that there is a phone call from my son. The head nurse says that he sounds very agitated.

  The Fog

  My littlest sister Delores come running through the doorway of our cabin puffing. “Silas, Silas, there’s a phone call for you down at the store.”

  I can tell she has run all the way; her braids are unravelled, her cheeks pink, and she smell of the outdoors. The phone is a half mile down the hill at Ben Stonebreaker’s Hobbema General Store. As we walk down, I hold onto Delores’ hand, and every once in a while we skip a step or two, Delores all the time talking a mile a minute. “Hurry up!” she say, pulling on my arm. But I ain’t expecting a phone call so anybody who needs to talk to me can wait until I get there.

  The phone is nailed to one of the back walls of the store. It made of varnished wood, is about a yard tall, and I bet is older than I am. I’m tall enough to talk into the mouth-piece, while most everybody else have to stand on th
eir tiptoes, yell up as if they talking to someone at the top of a hill.

  “Mr. Ermineskin,” say a man’s deep voice, the kind that set plates to rattling on the table if he was at your house. “My name is J. Michael Kirkpatrick and I’m Bureau Chief for Best North American News Service. I’ve read your books and I’m very impressed. Very impressed.”

  That means he’s going to ask me to do some work for him: interview somebody, write a column or something. The point I have to establish quick is, is he going to pay me, and if so, how much. Lots of people figure they can pay Indians with colored beads like in the old days; others figure that just because I’m an Indian I should be willing to work cheap.

  I listen to what Mr. Kirkpatrick have to say, and I go “Ummmmm,” and “Uh-huh,” at the proper points so he won’t figure the phone has gone dead.

  “As you are probably aware, the Pope is on a cross-country tour of Canada. One of his stops will be at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories, where he will meet with several thousand native people. We would like you to cover that event as a representative of Best North American News Service, and to write about it from a native point of view, so to speak.”

  “How much?” I ask. I’ve learned from sad experience not to be shy about taking money. Editors have kept me on the phone for an hour, or I’ve sat in a carpeted office listening to a long explanation of an assignment, only to find out they expect to pay me twenty dollars or less for the job.

  Mr. Kirkpatrick name a figure. I ask for double. He say no way. I say goodbye. He raise his price $250. I say okay.

  It is while he is telling me that I going to get to ride on a chartered airplane that I get my idea.

  “How would you like to not have to pay me at all?” I say.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Well, if you were to send two of my friends along with me, we’d settle for expenses. Medicine lady of our tribe was saying just last night how she’d like to meet the Pope. And I got a close friend I want to bring with me.”

  “Girlfriend, eh?” say Mr. Kirkpatrick.

  “No,” I say. “It’s a man.”

  “Oh, well, I suppose it’s okay.” He sound kind of embarrassed. “Somehow I never thought of you Indians being that way. But I suppose you are a writer.”

  Boy, when I tell Mad Etta what I arranged she get as excited as I ever seen her.

  “I want to have a talk with this Pope guy,” she say. “You know him and me ain’t so different. People believe in what he got to hand out—I can’t figure out why—but in the long run it don’t matter. For me, having people believe in my cures is about 90% of the battle. Maybe I can make a trade with this Mr. Pope. I seen him on the TV the other day and I can tell by the way he holds himself that he still got pains from the time he got shot. I’ll take him some cowslip roots to boil up; maybe I’ll even boil it for him. If he drinks the tea his pain will go away.”

  “Yeah, but what can he do for you?”

  “I’m not real sure. But he’s a nice man. And, if you stop to think about it, he believes in the old ways, just like us. Maybe I can learn from him something about influence. I mean we got over 4,000 people, but only about a hundred or so believe in me. I could use the secret of attracting more followers.”

  Frank’s biggest wish is to get Pope John Paul to bless his lottery tickets. “I’ll donate 10% of my winnings to his church. And I’d really like to have him get me a part in that Knight Rider TV show. I want to drive that superpowered car that talks like a person.”

  “Those ain’t the kinds of miracles the Pope usually get asked for,” I say.

  “Right. He must get tired of being asked to cure rheumatism and back aches. I figure he’ll pay attention to an unusual request.”

  “But you don’t believe.”

  “Not yet. I will as soon as that car from Knight Rider pull on to the reserve and say, ‘Come here, Frank Fencepost. I been dying to have you drive me.’”

  Though it is the fall season here in Alberta, with the days warm and the trees still covered with pumpkin-colored leaves, we take parkas and sleeping bags with us. We been to the Arctic once, Frank and me, and it was below zero there, in real temperature, even in the summer.

  We sit Etta on her tree-trunk chair in the back of Louis Coyote’s pickup truck and drive to the little airport in the middle of Edmonton. Like they promised, Best North American News Service have an airplane waiting. It is small, hold four passengers and a pilot, but it is new. I promised myself I’d never fly in a small plane again after I went to Pandemonium Bay in a plane with doors that wouldn’t close and windows where the snow blew right in, and an engine about as powerful as a sick Ski-Doo. But this is another time.

  The pilot wear a uniform just like he was in the air force.

  “Take us to see the Pope, General,” Frank say, salute the pilot. “You got champagne and movies on this here flight?”

  “But the pilot pay about as much attention to Frank as if he was a fly buzzing around his head; what he is staring at is Mad Etta.

  “It’s alright,” I tell him. “She’s a medicine lady; you’ll never crash with her aboard.”

  Etta is decked out in a new deerskin dress. “Deer population will be down for years to come,” is what Frank said when he first seen it. The dress got about 10 pounds of porcupine quills on it, including a purple circle on Etta’s front the size of a garbage can lid.

  “Getting her aboard is what I’m worried about,” says the pilot. “That door don’t expand.”

  He’s right. The little steps up to the door are like toys, and even ordinary people have to duck and turn to get inside.

  “Hey, when I want to do something I get it done,” say Etta. “Silas, you go inside and pull; Frank, you push.”

  Moving Etta is kind of like moving furniture. I seen guys get sofas and deepfreezes up twisting stairs and through doors smaller than the things they were moving.

  Etta give the directions and we do the work. A couple of times I figure Etta going to get stuck permanent. Then it look like the door-frame gonna split on us, or else Etta is. I think finally Etta just concentrate and shrink herself about four inches all around, for she pop through the door like she been greased.

  During the flight Etta sit on one side of the plane, while me, Frank, and the pilot, and all our luggage sit on the other.

  “The News Service has a bigger plane waiting in Yellowknife to take you on to Fort Simpson,” the pilot tell us.

  It is in Yellowknife where the real trouble start. There is hundreds and hundreds of reporters in the tiny airport, waiting to get any kind of aircraft to fly them to the even tinier airport in Fort Simpson. There’s also several TV people from Best North American News Service, who is determined to get to Fort Simpson.

  “Your friends are gonna have to stay behind,” say a cameraman, who is chewing on a cigar, look like Charles Bronson when he been without sleep for two days.

  “No way,” I say. “I’m working for nothing so my friends can go along.”

  “Look, no one ever thought of the shortage of transportation. Everything’s been cleared with J. Michael Kirkpatrick back in Toronto. You get paid your full fee plus a $500 bonus. Your friends get a hotel room here in Yellowknife and their meals until you get back from Fort Simpson. They’re lucky not to be going. It’s gonna be a madhouse there.”

  It don’t look like I have no choice. Boy, I sure hate to explain the change to Etta. When she hear what I have to say she rumble deep inside like bad plumbing.

  “When Etta get mad she usually get even,” I tell the Best North American people. But not knowing Etta, they ain’t impressed.

  There is more trouble when I get on the plane. Frank has found a seat for himself next to a lady.

  “I’m editor of this here Indian newspaper called The Moccasin Telegraph,” he is telling her as I come down the aisle. I notice he is already touching her body. “Ah, here’s my assistant now. His name is Silas Gopher; he’s sort of my gofer,” and Frank laugh
loud and hearty. He also have a jack-handle laid across his lap and when somebody from the airline tell him to move, he suggest he will do a certain amount of damage to anybody who try to take his seat from him. The pilot and his assistant have a quick meeting and decide to leave Frank where >he is; instead they let the cameraman sit in the aisle. If only Frank had thought to bring Etta with him.

  You know how when a special visitor is coming you clean up your house. You do things you would never ordinarily do, like wash in corners, clean things and places a visitor would never look. Well, that is the way it is with the whole town of Fort Simpson. The town is not very big to start with, only a thousand people they tell us. Fort Simpson is located where the Liard and Mackenzie Rivers meet, it is the trading place for all the native peoples for hundreds of miles. It seem to me every one of them people must have come to Fort Simpson to see the Pope. Boy, I really have never seen so many Indians in one place at one time.

  “Where’s our hotel?” is the first question Frank ask after we hit the ground.

  “Ha,” says the cameraman. “See that row of tents down along the riverbank. That’s where we stay. There’s only one small hotel in town and it’s been booked up forever. Shouldn’t be any problem for you guys though. Indians are used to living outdoors.”

  “Some Indians,” I say.

  I should have asked more questions before I took this job. I mean knowing about the outdoors don’t come naturally to Indians. Me and Frank aren’t campers or hunters or trackers. We like hotel rooms, Kentucky Fried Chicken, video games, riding in taxis, and electric guitars. But it look like we going to have to do without those things for a few days. What is here is like a disorganized carnival with no main event.

  It is Government money that keep Fort Simpson in business, so it is Government people who organize for the Pope’s visit. People who work full time for the Government is there ’cause they ain’t competent enough to work anywheres else. All around town they have really spent a lot of money to show how smart they ain’t.