Jericho (24 page)

You couldn’t tell how old Clarence was. He had that look of someone who’s lived outdoors most of his life, a combination of leathery skin and a very fit body. The one seemed to cancel out the other, making it impossible to guess his age.

Now I don’t like being thought of as racist. All the snide remarks I hear about Albertans being that way, rednecks etc., really get my temper going. Clarence never said or did anything to make me feel that he thought I was racist. He
didn’t even seem to look at me as white and himself as not. He didn’t show any sign that he thought this way. (I wonder how typical he was. Not very, I think.) There, I’ve done it again. Clarence, without trying to, made me feel like I was a racist white woman because he was so different from what I expected that it made me realize that what I expected was nothing but a bunch of stereotypes. I thought he’d be the silent type but he talked our ears off. I thought he’d walk through the woods without making a noise and without disturbing a twig or a leaf. In fact, he always made the same terrible commotion he did that first day, chomping through the thicket, tripping over I’m not sure what, being clumsy. (It would have been funny if a bear had shown up, because after her singing debut Theresa always assumed that any thrashing noise was just Clarence coming by to yak.) For all his talking, I never learned much about him, because he spoke so fast you couldn’t interrupt. He didn’t ask us back to where he lived, and Bishop told me not to fish for an invitation. This disappointed me because I would have liked to see how the people lived, especially the women. The only Indians I’d ever seen back home were Cree.

Clarence came by sometimes every day, sometimes every other day, and he and Bishop would have low-pitched conversations. Sometimes they’d even go for a walk out in the deep woods between the townsite and the canyon, so’s to be out of hearing—our hearing. Once in a while I’d see them strolling. Bishop would be moving his hands about as he talked and looking nervous (or am I imagining this?). Clarence’s hands just hung down at his sides or sometimes were stuck in his pockets and he seemed to stumble a lot, tripping over his feet or maybe something on the ground
that I couldn’t see, a branch or a big twig maybe, though I had a pretty clear view from that height. Once I saw Bishop give Clarence a bunch of money. We couldn’t have had much left over after our shopping trip on the way up there. That’s why Theresa had used her credit card and ended up in such a fuss. So I figured that Bishop had some stashed away behind a rotten wallboard somewhere. I guessed that Clarence was getting paid for a building he’d found and was going to take apart and drag up to the townsite for Bishop to put together next spring or summer, spreading it all out like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle dumped in a pile in the centre of a table. Some days later I was carrying my bucket with the hole in it out to the garden and I saw—and heard, too; you couldn’t keep from hearing—Clarence disappearing back into the trees with two green garbage bags of something that wasn’t very heavy. When he was gone, I went over to where he’d been, under the wire fenceline with all the keys and pull tabs and washers on it, and saw that a good number of the pot plants had been stripped of their leaves. I know you’ll have trouble believing this but it took me quite a while to put everything together.

One day Bishop said to Clarence, “Do you feel like some food?” And Clarence, who’d just got in, surprised me by saying sure. We all had lunch together, our usual canned veggies and Japanese noodles and tea made with dried-out bags and powdered milk. It was Theresa’s day to do the “cooking.” Any time I thought we were starting to run low on one of the supplies, Bishop would show me where more was hidden. The new cache was always a mix of different stuff. That’s how we kept the diet from getting too boring.

Clarence had news.

He said to Bishop, “I found the nest at the back of my shop. You should see all the junk. It’s really amazing. I put out a big trap.”

I asked what they were talking about.

“There’s a pack rat that’s been stealing stuff from me for years,” Bishop said.

“A pack rat!” Theresa’d been quiet until now. “There’s really a creature called a pack rat? I always considered that a folk narrative.”

“They’re real all right. Why do you think I’ve got everything cached up high?”

“Moisture,” she said with unusual meekness.

“Because the cocksucker was stealing me blind. I’d seen him lots of times but never caught him. Course I needed a cat. But he’d have stolen the cat too, dragged him off by the scruff of the neck to his secret hideaway. He made off with damn near everything else. Every time I needed some small tool like a particular drill bit, I’d turn round and it’d be gone. I’d see him with it now and then, usually at night. Other times I’d hear him, dragging the take along the floor. Finally I found his home address. Over in the hotel I found this perfect round mouse hole in the side on the floor, just like you see in the cartoons. I had half a spray can of that foam insulation that turns hard. Well, I put the nozzle straw inside and emptied the damn thing. I was hoping I’d cemented him inside to die. But I guess I cemented him out. He kept right on swiping stuff. He was still at it last August. But I could never find out where he moved to.”

“I did,” Clarence said, puffing himself out a little with pride. (Seeing him now at closer range I saw he had really bad skin for a Native guy.)

After lunch, Clarence, Bishop and I started trudging off someplace, I didn’t know where exactly. To me it seemed a break from work, and Jericho really was hard work, living that way, making do so far from anyplace else. Once again, I appreciated more than ever what Mother had managed to do, raising Annie and me with no men around (though of course that was a blessing too). Theresa came along, working her legs fast so as to keep up with us, especially the men, who both had long strides. She was subdued, though she had a stern look. Maybe it was determination. We walked through woods, bush and fields for maybe an hour and a half, following different paths (you couldn’t really call them trails). How far? It’s hard to say. Four or five kilometres maybe, I’m not sure. We kept switching back and forth. There weren’t any straight lines, and a lot of it was rough ground.

Then we came to the place in a natural clearing where Clarence obviously lived. (I’d just naturally assumed that he lived on a reserve but he didn’t. I didn’t want to ask.) He had a trailer, one of those meant to be carried on a small truck, with an extended bit that goes over the roof of the cab. That part he’d supported with posts set into the concrete slab that ran underneath the whole thing. In the shade of this overhang he’d set up two kitchen chairs. There was a hammock a few metres away, and I saw his Ski-Doo propped up and covered with a blue tarp. He’d tried to fix up the place as nice as he could. He’d built an A-frame with a metal roof on top of the trailer and had a downspout that emptied into a rain barrel. He used the hollow space under the pitch roof to store pieces of lumber. To make a planter he’d stacked up two or three truck tires with big treads, but I couldn’t see
what he was growing. The path to the outhouse was lined with whitewashed rocks that were bigger than grapefruit but smaller than soccer balls. The place was small and basic, but that’s how I grew up too, and I’m proud of it. Actually his place was a lot more comfortable than maybe I’m making it sound, a lot more comfortable than Jericho, that’s for sure, and cleaner too. At the back of the property was a large metal building, the kind you put together yourself. Clarence called it his workshop.

He left the double door open, which threw a surprising amount of light inside, but he had a flashlight with him all the same. There was a lot of bunches of tall sticks, tied together, leaning up in one corner. I’m not sure what they were for. They were way too long for garden stakes. What they looked like was poles you’d use to put up a teepee. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. He obviously didn’t live in a teepee and yes I know he wasn’t from that kind of Native culture. Besides there were enough of them there for a whole teepee village. Clarence cleared most of the bundles away, almost poking holes in his tin roof, I thought, and then got rid of a lot of boxes of tools behind them. He shined the light on the spot and we got down and studied it. There were pieces of junk scattered everywhere.

“The nest,” he said.

There was a small black plastic pocket comb and a tiny screwdriver on a chain that people use to fix their eyeglasses. There was a condom with little teeth marks in its foil wrapper, several pennies and a dime: a lot of stuff like that. Strangest of all was a miniature bottle of brandy, the size that airlines sell; maybe the colour of the glass made it interesting. There was a broken key, a rawhide shoelace,
some bits of coloured glass, one earring, nuts and bolts, a plastic funnel, a leather patch from something, all mouldy now, staples and a red plastic stapler. All over the place were tufts of fibreglass insulation. I could almost see him sitting on his rat haunches tearing the stuff into rat-sized pieces with his short rat arms. We didn’t know what to make of all this. At least I didn’t. I’d have thought they always go for something they could eat or maybe only for shiny things. I didn’t know what was so attractive about this garbage. It was almost as though he was building something. Well, a nest, I guess. Duh. That’s why they call it that. So maybe he was a she-rat.

“I got him!”

Clarence was calling from the other end of the building.

“I put a trap out for him and I got him.”

I guess it was a male rat all right, from the size. He was lying on his back, stiff. The long tail was stiff too. It stuck out behind him like a handle. His front paws were pulled in and there was dried blood around his head where the arm of the trap, one of those wooden jobs, like a kitchen mousetrap but six times bigger, had caught him right in the neck. The pressure made his eyes bug out in a way that was really yucky.

The rearrival of the Object’s Native friend is observed by me from a distance. I see them having conversation but cannot overhear. An abnormal scene. You could almost say humorous or comedic. Object with tall skinny outline and poor posture, an adult-sized boy, and his companion, significantly shorter, fuller, imparting data. The Native appears calm while the Object exhibits signs of last stages of paranoia, agitation in the extreme.
I prognositize he will be enraged in a moment. He of course has no comprehension of the relationship between anger and depression or even how complex his depression is. He is living proof of the truth of the current approach in the field—the idea that depression does not arise only from reactive function or internal one, but that the two kinds come together—some random, endogenous, others a response to something that takes place. I have no one I can discuss such matters with. This is how pioneer social scientists felt living all alone in the jungle with only the uneducated local peoples. It is good for me that I am keeping such a careful record of these findings and cognitions. Otherwise who would believe?

Bishop said, “Goddam that bitch. I told her that credit card stunt would blow everything apart.” That was the first I knew that our late spring was coming to a premature end before summer could take hold. It seems that people in the Band had a visit from the Mounties who wanted to know where Clarence was, because they knew he could lead them to us. I saw Clarence disappear back into the bush, making a lot of racket as usual. He moved like someone who had other places to be but he wasn’t panicky. Bishop, though, seemed pretty shaken up.

“They’ll be closing in soon enough,” he said. I remember this very clearly.

“What about the truck?”

“That’s the last thing I’d do.” Those were his exact words as I recall. Then he said: “No more roads where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

“I’ve got my plans.”

“What about Theresa and me?”

“You I’d take if I could. She can fuck herself.”

I asked him what he thought we should do. He was gathering up stuff into an old backpack. It looked to me like he already had a basic getaway kit that he was just adding things to. Looking back now I wonder if he didn’t have packs already made in all sorts of places up and down the countryside. He unbuckled the belt on his pants and slipped a knife on it. A knife in a sheath. I followed when he took the knife inside the collapsing cabin, the one that was contaminated, and started to dig in the dirt floor. A few inches down, in a spot he carefully measured off, he came to a glass jar, like a preserve jar with a metal clasp and a big pink rubber seal—a really old one. It was full of money, including coins. He counted it out and gave me all the change and a lot of the paper money, including some of those old brown two-dollar bills.