This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [98]
The town's remnant of the Blackfeet nation seemed even more mauled than those who frequented Dupuyer—squinty leather-colored people, men with black braids dropping tiredly from under their cowboy hats, women so fat they seemed to waddle even standing still. These people dipped and veered along the sidewalks, entire families drunk by midday, cars racketing away with bodies spilled half out the windows.
Which was explainable enough: anyone who was industrious was out of sight somewhere earning a living, and to judge a people entirely by the Browning street scenes was as blinkered as walking into the non-Indian saloon crowds on a Saturday night in White Sulphur Springs or Dupuyer and declaring that no white person in the county could be capable of drawing a sober breath. Yet we did judge that way, and hard. When we met an Indian rancher at the eastern boundary of our lease land who was diligent and prosperous, Dad said: Well, they can do some work if they want to, I guess. But most of them Browning bozoes ought to sign on for lessons from the Hoots.
Since the Blackfeet never appeared out on their own landscape, we took advantage of the emptiness to become steady poachers, letting the pothole lakes feed us fresh meat. Ducks and geese dabbled there all summer long, and our .22 rifle made a soft, quickly-gone whinng which couldn't be heard beyond the ridges. Dad and I had sharpshooting contests, trying to snick off the ducks' heads without touching the body meat. Spot, forever ready for trouble or help, instantly learned to retrieve; Grandma whooped orders and scoldings at him until he would deposit the birds to her gently as a feathery bouquet.
Life inside the trailer house was as cramped as life outside was unbounded. Our entire space was about twenty feet long and seven feet wide. Dad and I shared the bunk which went across one end; Grandma made her bed on the padded built-in bench which doubled as seating along one side of the table. Between the beds was walled a welter of tiny drawers, cabinets, closets, a cookstove, and the breadbox-sized battery radio on which Grandma listened to her soap operas in the mornings and Dad and I listened to the baseball broadcasts while the sheep were shaded down at midday.
The sun's heat hit the aluminum-painted roof of the trailer and went bowling off in dizzy wavers, but even so, the central part of the day inside our quarters was like being in a lidded stewpot. Time stretched and sagged. The dogs abandoned us and went to lie drooped and panting in the square of shade beneath the Jeep. When we weren't trying to doze through the hot hours, Dad and I read, Grandma either played solitaire or crocheted, periodically straightening her glasses in disgust and giving her commentary that Wouldn't you just know, this thread keeps tangling itself six ways from Sunday.
The one among us truly at ease with the drifting prairie life was Kitten, who instantly discovered himself to be a long-grass hunter. We would catch early-morning glimpses of him padding off through the ridgeline's shoetop-high veldt, an intent tiger the size and shade of a jackrabbit. To Grandma's agitation, Kitten always was away on a hunt whenever we moved the trailer house to a new site. Each time she would storm fretfully about his absence, each time Dad would declare, as if he knew everything about cats, He'll turn up when he gets his fill of prowlin', and each time, that night or the next morning, Kitten would come purring in along the wheel tracks on the grass and leap casually into Grandma's lap.
But for the three of us cooped in the trailer house, this boundless northland—mockery again—seemed to be tightening and tightening our lives. The first weeks of July came, and the ewes were sheared by a Mexican crew who put up a canvas town amid the tan grass for two days and then vanished. The prairie hung even emptier once their