25
SATURDAY afternoon I found a message on my machine, staticky and unintelligible but also distinctly menacing. The only phrase I even came close to deciphering sounded something like, “Even a stone predator got to floss out the crap from between its fangs.” When I checked the caller ID, I discovered that the number belonged to the Avalon Diner in Sugar Land, Texas. I didn’t want to think about it, or about Dylan’s warning, and I was feeling sort of recklessly bored, so around mid-afternoon after I’d had a couple of drinks I drove to Charlevoix to see Salteau at the Smelt Fry. The high school gymnasium where the event was held was crowded and hot, with an acrid smell of smoking oil, fried dough, and fish. At a station in the corner several men wearing aprons and paper hats stood dropping battered smelt and onion rings into deep fat fryers and lifting sizzling smelt and onion rings from them in wire strainer baskets, emptying the cooked food into aluminum pans that were kept piled high, while a long line of people stood waiting to be served. When Salteau came down off the platform that had been erected for the performers, he removed his hat and placed it on the edge of the stage, and somebody came and handed him a paper plate of fish and onion rings and a cup of Faygo pop, talked to him for a moment, and then left him. Salteau put his plate on the stage beside his hat, sipped from the cup, mopped his face with a bandanna he took from the back pocket of his jeans, and then replaced the hat. He took his plate and began to eat, slowly, meditatively, one hand hovering over the food on his plate. He gazed at me.
“I know you,” he said. “Cherry City library. How’d you like the PG-13 stuff?” He lifted a smelt, looking at me, and put it in his mouth. “Think I can tell stories to little kids about eating shit?” He laughed. Then he scrutinized me. “How long you been here from New York?”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m an Indian.” He shrugged. “Where’s your friend? The Indian girl?”
“Indian girl?”
“That girl I’ve seen you with lately.”
“I think she’s Asian.”
“She’s an Indian. Give me a break.” He reared back a little and studied me from under the brim of his hat.
It occurred to me that I had no idea. I’d made my assumptions and filled in the background (as usual). I’d invented a pair of hardworking immigrant parents, mom-and-pop store owners, high-achieving kids, maybe a dermatologist or dentist among them. It always seemed important to have a story, even if it was a stereotype.
“Maybe she is. She never mentioned it.”
“Some are like that.” He shrugged again. He picked up another smelt, then dropped it on the plate.
“This place smells like shit,” he said. “Come on, let’s go outside.”
He hitched up his pants and I followed him through the crowd to one of the exit doors, which let us out into an asphalt schoolyard. The door slammed behind us and we stood alone in the dusk, the eastern sky a flat, even lavender. Three crows hopped near an overflowing garbage can. One abruptly took flight and landed in a nearby tree, where he called to the others.
“So you like the stories, huh?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“I heard ’em all right here,” he said. “That’s where I’m from. Horton Bay. You know those three Ojibway in the Hemingway story? The ones who catch Nick Adams’s dad in a lie about whose timber washed up on his land?”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “I know the story,” I said.
“Those were my cousins and my great-grandfather,” Salteau said.
“The Indians?”
“Yeah, Ignatz. The Indians.”
It seems to me that to assert an identity as someone else’s fictional character is among the strangest forms self-abnegation can take. Ultimately, those who feel that their identities have been borrowed are flattered — insulted, maybe, but flattered. Hemingway’s Indians are depicted as thugs and half-wits; their calling out of Dr. Adams on the timber whose theft he is attempting to conceal has more to do with the unwillingness of one of them to work off a debt than with their misgivings about the ownership of the wood. I remembered what I’d said to Kat at Gagliardi’s, about how there were probably a thousand people in the region claiming a direct connection to Hemingway’s life and work: under other circumstances, I would have assumed that Salteau could see only his stake in a historic imagination.
This was different. While the coincidence wasn’t completely impossible (or so I tried to tell myself), I couldn’t help feeling that a creation of mine had taken physical form and appeared before me. I asked, “Have you been here your whole life?”
“I’ve moved around some. I was in the army. Drove a cab in Seattle. Wore a white collar, insurance business, for a while. You OK?”
I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I nodded, but I wasn’t really OK.
“So why didn’t you bring that babe tonight?” he said.
“She’s not in town. She lives in Chicago.”
“Why are you here, if she’s there? Babe like that? You must be a nutcase.” He laughed.
“She had work,” I said. “She’s a reporter.”
“Ah, the media. You ain’t a reporter, though. You don’t ask enough questions.” He gestured at himself in mock surprise. “I’m asking all the questions.”
“Well, she’s actually interested in you,” I said.
“Like for a story? Why’d she be interested in me? I never go to Chicago. I been to Chicago once. They don’t need Indians in Chicago. They need Indians right here.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He hitched up his pants again and we began walking together toward the parking lot on the other side of the building.
“So,” Salteau said after a while. “You and this reporter you ain’t interested in boning. If you really want a story, come on out and talk to me.” We’d arrived at an old blue-and-white Ford pickup. He opened the passenger side door and took a notepad from the glove compartment. Leaning against the hood, he wrote out an Abbottsville address and then tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.
“Drop by,” he said. “I bet I could tell her some things she’ll want to hear.” He climbed into the cab and slid over to the driver’s side and started the engine. I watched as he backed out of his space, the beams of his headlights swinging through the cold still air of the parking lot, the sky beyond nearly night now, stars emerging one by one from the darkness like the remembered parts of a dream.
26
KAT returned to Cherry City on Monday afternoon and called me. I asked her to have dinner with me at the Tanager, a “classy” restaurant up in Darning, the kind of place that has wall-to-wall carpeting, exposed beams, chandeliers, plush booths and banquettes, a view of the water through the spotless expanse of glass lining one side of the building, a richly satisfying menu of completely familiar American food, and a clientele who fill the parking lot with their Buick and Lincoln sedans. I was a little surprised when she agreed, but I’d told her that I had some news about Salteau.
We met at the restaurant. We were seated in a corner near the kitchen, possibly because I’d decided, in the absence of a commitment to anything else, to commit to my quasi-survivalist look. The rest of the room looked like it was filled with delegates to the 1984 Republican National Convention.
“Nice crowd,” said Kat.
“The food’s good,” I said.
“This is the sort of place that would make my husband shudder.”
The waiter brought our drinks, white wine for Kat and a double Laphroaig on the rocks for me. I’d already had one at the bar while I waited for her to arrive.