A Short History of Indians in Canada

by Thomas King

  “He still drink?”

  The two of them had an argument. I got sent out to the garden, but I could hear my grandmother’s voice, even over the crackle and snap of the cornstalks moving in the afternoon air. After we loaded the box into the trunk, my mother stood behind the car and looked at the house. She stood like that for a while, and, then, we got in the car and drove home.

  Most Fridays my father would take me to Jerry’s for dinner. I’d always order the cheeseburger and fries, and my father would order the clubhouse with a side of Thousand Islands dressing so he could dip his sandwich in it.

  “You ever going to come home?”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “She says you aren’t.”

  “She should know.”

  I waited until he finished his sandwich and was stirring the sugar into his coffee.

  “Mum said I could come to one of the rehearsals if you would take me.”

  “She said that?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What did she say exactly?”

  “I forget.”

  My father finished his coffee. He didn’t say anything else about the play, and I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. So I was surprised when we pulled up in front of the auditorium.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what she’s up to.”

  He told me to be quiet, that we were only going to stay for a little while. We stood at the back of the auditorium where it was dark and no one could see us. My mother and Miss Morehouse were on stage, and they were arguing. We watched the play for about fifteen minutes, and then my father nudged me. When we got out to the parking lot, he laughed suddenly and threw his head back.

  “God, what a bitch!”

  “Mum’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  “Just like real life.”

  “Can we go to see the play?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  My father made me promise that I wouldn’t tell my mother that we saw part of the rehearsal, and I didn’t. But I did ask her if I could come to the play.

  “You wouldn’t enjoy it, honey.”

  “Sure I would.”

  “It’s an adult play.”

  “If Dad takes me, can I come?”

  “I’ll talk to your father,” she said. “Let me talk to your father.”

  My mother told my father that under no circumstances was he to bring me to the play. Those were her exact words, he said. We sat at the counter and ate our food in silence, and, when Jerry brought the coffee pot, my father asked me how old I was.

  “Almost eleven.”

  “Well, hell,” he said. “You’re almost a man.”

  “Why doesn’t Mum want me to see the play?”

  “Because she’s a bitch. In the play.”

  “It’s just a play. It’s not real life.”

  “Some people don’t know the difference.”

  “I do.”

  “Good for you,” and he slapped me on my shoulder. “Hey, Jerry,” he shouted. “Bring my kid a cup of coffee, will ya. He’s damn near a grown man.”

  “Does that mean we can go?”

  I asked my mother once why they had split up and all she ever said was that marriage had been a surprise. I asked my father, too, but he said I should ask my mother. When I told him I had, he wanted to know what she had said. So I told him.

  Friday was opening night. My father was waiting for me when I got to his apartment. He was dressed in a blue suit with a red tie. He looked real good.

  “I got married in this suit.”

  “You look like a movie star.”

  “That’s what your mother said.”

  We didn’t go to Jerry’s for dinner. We went to Antoine’s instead, where you could sit at tables and have waitresses bring your food to you. My father spent the meal adjusting his napkin and looking at his watch.

  “You think Mum could have been an actress?”

  “All you need is a good imagination.”

  “Is that why you married her?”

  “Is that what she said?”

  We got to the auditorium late. I thought we would sit at the back where no one could see us, but my father marched down the centre aisle and found us seats in the second row.

  If my mother saw us, she never let on. She was great. The character she played was an awful woman who was really nasty to Alexandria and who wouldn’t give her husband his medicine when he was dying. By the end of the play, I was expecting that someone was going to shoot her. But no one did.

  When the curtain came down, everyone in the auditorium stood and clapped, even my father. Then the players came out on the stage, and someone from behind the curtain brought out bouquets of flowers. Standing there in the lights, smiling at the applause, she really looked like an actress. She really did. My mother got two bouquets. Miss Morehouse only got one.

  “So what did you think?” my father asked me as we walked to the car.

  “She was good. Didn’t you think she was good?”

  “Made you want to strangle her, didn’t it.”

  “She really wanted to play Alexandria.”

  “Alexandria? The blonde bimbo?”

  My mother was waiting for me when I got home Saturday. She had put the bouquets of flowers in the green vase and set them in the shop window.

  “Santucci throw those away?”

  “No. I got them for being in the play.”

  “You must have been good.”

  “The big bunch is from your father.”

  We didn’t talk about the play, and I was never sure if she knew I had been there. My father came by that Sunday still dressed in his suit, and the two of them went for a walk and talked, I guess. She came back alone.

  My mother made lunch, and, while we were eating, she told me about how life was always full of surprises, that some of them were good and some of them were bad.

  “Does that mean Dad is coming home?”

  “What did I just say?”

  Then she told me about Eddie Bertacci and the postcards. She was angry. I don’t know why, but I figured it was because I had gone to the play. After lunch, she turned the hi-fion and we listened to her records.

  The flowers lost most of their petals in less than a week, but my mother trimmed and cut them back until there was nothing left but the stems.

  The Garden Court Motor Motel

  Sunday. And the train is late.

  Sonny stands at the edge of the pool at the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL scooping bugs out of the water with the long-handled net and waits for the train to come chug-chug-chugging along. So he can hear Uncle HOLIE blow the train’s horn. So he can wave to all the passengers on their way to the coast. Water in the pool is sure blue. Blue and cool. Maybe he’ll take his shirt off. But he isn’t going to get in. No, sir. No sky-blue water for him. Even if the clouds don’t come and cool things off, he isn’t fool enough for that.

  He’s the smart one.

  There are three bugs on the net. Dead. All the bugs he pulls out of the pool are dead. When DAD was a boy, there were fish in the pool. That’s what DAD says, and he knows everything.

  Sonny knows everything too. He knows all about sky-blue pool water and dead bugs. You can’t swim in the pool. You can’t swim in the pool unless you rent a room. Those are the rules, and ADAM and EVE and all their kids come by on vacation in a brand new Winnebago pull up to the office and say, pretty please, aren’t going to get in the water until there’s up-front money and the key deposit. That’s the way things are.

  Like it or hike it.

  Sonny steps on a crack. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Cracks in the concrete. Cracks in the white stucco. Cracks in the black asphalt. Cracks in the fifty-foot sign with the flashing neon-red ball that blinks “GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL” and “Welcome.”

  And it’s new.

  Cracks in the windows. Cracks in the walls. Cracks hiding at the bottom of the pool where Sonny can’t get at them.

  Don
’t worry about the cracks, DAD tells Sonny. After a while, you don’t even notice them.

  The GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. Parking for long-haul truckers. Pool. Ice-making machine. Laundromat. Vibrating beds.

  One day all this will be his. That’s what DAD says.

  The GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. Twenty-four rooms. Cable television. Telephone. Air conditioning. Video rentals. Breakfast coupons for the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.

  Sonny swings the net deep and catches some cloud-shade on his shoulder. Here they come, he thinks to himself, and he forgets the bugs and looks up into the sky. But it’s not a cloud. There are no clouds. Not even on the edges of the world, which he can see clearly from poolside, is there even the mention of a cloud.

  Now, what the DING-DONG is that, he says to the dead bugs in the net.

  It’s surely not a cloud. But now half of him is in the shade, and he’s standing in shadows with his net and the dead bugs, watching the pool water turn black and deep.

  Whatever it is, it’s coming fast. And he starts thinking fast, too. A meteor would be okay. Or a flying saucer. Or a dark-green garbage bag.

  One thing is for sure. It’s not the train.

  Okay. Okay. He looks up because he’s run out of things, and he’s sorry now he didn’t finish high school.

  “DING-DONG,” he says, even though he knows DAD doesn’t like that kind of language.

  “DING-DONG,” he says, because he’s excited. Not in a naughty, excited way, but in that excited way he gets when he watches someone get whistled with a phaser on Star Trek.

  “Clear the way!”

  Doesn’t sound like a meteor.

  “Look out below!”

  Doesn’t sound like a green garbage bag.

  “MOVE IT!”

  And that’s when Sonny thinks about running. Getting the DING-DONG out of there. And he knows now that this is the right answer, and that he would have thought of it all by himself if he had just had a little more time, but now it’s too late, and he knows that whatever it is that is falling out of the sky and screaming at him is going to hit the motel or the parking lot or the pool or—DING-DONG, DING-DONG, DING-DONG—him.

  Before he can finish netting all of the bugs.

  The way DING-DONG hits the fan.

  POOOWLAAASH!

  The explosion whips the net out of Sonny’s hands and knocks him off his feet, and, as he goes down in a wet, lumpy heap, he finally figures it out. The video camera was the right answer. He should have run and got the video camera.

  DING-DONG!

  Instead he didn’t finish high school and that’s sure as DING-DONG one of the reasons he’s soaking wet, flat on his DING-DONG, watching the waves break over the side of the pool. His ears are ringing, but when he opens his eyes he discovers that he can see fine, and what he sees when he looks is something floating to the surface of the water.

  It’s too big to be a bug.

  “Hello,” says the woman. “Hello,” she says again.

  All Sonny can see is the woman’s head, but what he sees is disturbing. RED SKIN and BLACK HAIR. Okay, okay, okay. Sonny has to think. BLACK PEOPLE have BLACK SKIN and BLACK HAIR. And ASIAN PEOPLE have YELLOW SKIN and BLACK HAIR.

  This is hard.

  And HISPANIC PEOPLE have BROWN SKIN and BLACK HAIR. So THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY must be…must be…

  Sonny takes out his Illustrated Field Guide for Exotic Cultures, skips past Leviticus, and goes straight to the section with the pictures. Sonny thinks about asking the woman. Asking in a friendly manner. But he remembers that asking is against the law, and that if the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY has the money or a valid credit card he is legally required to rent her a room. Unless the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL is all booked up, which it always is when people from exotic cultures arrive at the front desk.

  But he can guess. Guessing isn’t illegal. And after looking at all the pictures, some of which are pretty graphic and revealing, he guesses that the woman in the pool is an INDIAN.

  “You have to be a guest to swim in the pool,” says Sonny.

  “What happened to all the water?” says the woman.

  “That’s the rule.” And now Sonny’s feeling better. Now he’s feeling in charge, again.

  “Last time I was here,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, “everything was water.”

  A meteor would have been simpler. Not the one that killed the dinosaurs. Something smaller. Dig it out, fill in the hole, patch the cracks, and get on with renting rooms to long-haul truckers bound for the coast. Too DING-DONG bad. Could have sold a meteor.

  “What happened to the turtle?”

  “We’re all booked up,” says Sonny.

  “Why does the water smell funny?” The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY gets out of the pool and Sonny can see that his exotic culture tribulations are not over yet.

  But Sonny has it figured out, now. The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY fell out of a plane. You read about such things every day. She fell out of a plane. And the wind tore her clothes off.

  That’s why she’s NAKED.

  “DING-DONG,” says Sonny, because he’s excited and appalled at the same time.

  “DING-DONG,” he says again, because he didn’t finish high school and can’t think of anything else to say.

  But most of all, Sonny says “DING-DONG” twice because the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY has really big YOU-KNOW-WHATS and she’s really hairy YOU-KNOW-WHERE.

  And because she’s PREGNANT.

  Sonny looks up in the sky. But he doesn’t see any sign of her INDIAN husband on the way down. Maybe he wasn’t on the plane. Maybe he’s driving out to meet her. Maybe he’s on horseback. Maybe he’s chasing buffalo. Maybe he’s annoying a settler. Sonny knows what INDIANS do when no one is looking.

  “You can’t wait here,” says Sonny. “You’ll have to wait for him at the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.”

  “What husband?”

  DING-DONG, thinks Sonny. He was afraid of that. How many times has DAD warned him about something like this? As if there weren’t enough women in the world already. As if we needed another one. And an INDIAN one at that. And PREGNANT at that. Well, she can’t go to the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace. Now that Sonny thinks about it, he remembers that people eat there. People bring their families there.

  “We’re all booked up.”

  “There’s supposed to be a turtle,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, and she crosses her arms on top of her tummy and underneath her YOU-KNOW-WHATS, so the water drips off THOSE OTHER THINGS. “Where are all the water animals?”

  Turtles? Water animals? Sonny doesn’t like the sound of this.

  “Who’s going to dive into the water and bring up the dirt?”

  All right! That does it. Sonny drops the pole by the side of the pool so it makes a CLANG-CLANG sound and gets the woman’s attention.

  “Dirt?” says Sonny. “Do you see any dirt at the bottom of my pool?”

  The WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY walks to the edge of the pool and stares into the sky-blue water. And she looks at the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. She doesn’t look too happy now. She doesn’t look too smug, either. Now she knows who’s in charge.

  “Not again,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY.

  “As for any animals,” says Sonny, “there’s a pet-damage deposit of twenty-five dollars, cash or credit card,” though Sonny doesn’t know why he says this, since he can see that the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY doesn’t have any animals, nor does she have any pockets in which to keep a credit card or enough money for a pet deposit, let alone a room.

  It’s a good thing Sonny’s already made the beds and vacuumed the office and checked the licences on the cars in the parking lot against the registration forms. It’s a good thing he’s collected the money from the vending machines and the washing machine and the dryer. It’s a good thing he has nothing better to do than to stand by the pool and chat with an IND
IAN who is NAKED and PREGNANT. It’s a good thing DAD is having a nap. It’s a good thing there’s nothing on television.

  “Why do you guys keep messing things up?” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY. “Why can’t you guys ever get things right?”

  Sonny isn’t sure the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY knows the difference between right and not right. For instance, being NAKED is certainly not right. Being PREGNANT without a husband is definitely not right.

  And being INDIAN…well, Sonny isn’t positive that being an INDIAN is not right, but…

  “Looks like we’re going to have to fix it again,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY.

  We? What do you mean we, Kemo-sabe? DAD taught him that one. No way, Jose. Sonny knows them all. Hasta la vista, baby. Take a hike.

  “Before it’s too late.”

  Sonny knows better than to fall for that one. Only thing late around here is the train.

  “Okay,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY. “Pay attention. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. I fall out of the sky into the water and am rescued by a turtle. Four water animals dive to the bottom of the water and one of them brings up a bunch of dirt. I put the dirt on the back of the turtle and the dirt expands until it forms the Earth. Are you with me so far?”

  DAD says that people who sound as if they know what they are talking about are generally trying to sell you something.

  “Then I give birth to twins, a right-handed twin and a left-handed twin. They roam the world and give it its physical features. Between the two of them, they help to create a world that is balanced and in harmony.”

  Encyclopedias. Sonny is pretty sure that the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY is selling encyclopedias.

  “But if I can’t find the turtle, I can’t fix the world.”

  The train doesn’t pull onto the siding next to the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL until evening.

  “Three guys in a Chevrolet stalled on a level-crossing,” Uncle HOLIE tells Sonny. “Drunk as skunks. Where’s your DAD?”

  “Sunday,” says Sonny. “He’s resting.”