Indians on Vacation Read online

  Pablo Picasso died in Mougins, France. Peggy Guggenheim died in Venice, Italy. Paul Gauguin died in Atuona, French Polynesia.

  I slump in the chair, close my eyes, and wait for the dawn.

  II

  So we’re in Prague. It’s morning, and Mimi doesn’t want to get out of bed.

  “What time is it?”

  “Time to get up.”

  “I need nine hours.”

  “They only serve breakfast until nine thirty.”

  “Then wake me at nine twenty-five,” she calls out from under the covers.

  The spiders have moved into a tight circle in the corner of the ceiling. Outside, the fog has disappeared, and it sounds as though a herd of geese is on the move. But it’s only tourists, arrived on the bridge to take photographs of the city in the early light.

  “I need to eat,” I tell Mimi. “You’ll have to get yourself up.”

  This doesn’t even elicit a moan.

  I try a different tack. “You wait too long,” I say, “and all the good stuff will be gone.”

  I’ve stayed at any number of chain hotels in North America—Fairmont, Holiday Inn, Ramada, Hampton—hotels that give you a free breakfast with each reservation. In general, these offerings are breakfasts in name only. Weak coffee, gelatinous yogurt, cold-storage apples, cellophane pastries, toast with whipped butter and strawberry-jam packets, and cook-it-yourself Dixie-cup waffles.

  All the nutritional value of a can of Coke.

  When I had made the reservations for the Certovka, I had had the option of booking the room with breakfast or without breakfast. Since we had never been to Prague before and since I didn’t want to spend the better part of each morning looking for a restaurant, I had gone with the breakfast option.

  When I get downstairs, I discover that all the tables are taken.

  “Hello, hello.”

  There is an older man sitting at a table by himself. Short and thin. Dark sports coat. White shirt buttoned up all the way. Silver hair combed straight back. Skin the colour of an old saddle.

  “You are the Canadian, yes?” He gestures to the empty chair. “Sit, sit.”

  I smile politely. “My wife is joining me.”

  “However, she is still in bed. This is true, yes?”

  The man’s eyes are different colours. One is blue, while the other one is gold.

  “Oscar Zoraster Diggs,” says the man with a tilt of his head, so the gold eye catches the light. “But everyone calls me Oz.”

  “Like the wizard.”

  “Yes, of course,” says the man. “The wonderful wizard.”

  “Blackbird,” I say with a nod. “Blackbird Mavrias. But everyone calls me Bird.”

  “Mavrias?” says Oz. “This is Greek? Yes?”

  “Yes,” I say. “My mother.”

  “And Black? Bird?”

  “My father,” I tell him. “Blackbird. It’s one word.”

  “This is a Canadian name?”

  “Cherokee. North American Indian.”

  “The pass at Thermopolis,” says Oz with a wistful smile. “Little Bighorn.”

  From the table, I can see the breakfast buffet. Cold meat, fruit, cheeses, breads, and what looks to be some kind of porridge.

  “You must eat,” Oz tells me. “Before the tourists show up.”

  “I’m a tourist.”

  “Yes, of course,” says Oz. “But this will be our secret.”

  I wander the buffet. I pick my way through the things I should eat and the things I want to eat. As a diabetic, I’m supposed to embrace protein and avoid carbohydrates. At least, that’s the theory.

  Oz is waiting for me when I return. “A Greek god and a bloodthirsty savage?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You must tell me how this could happen.”

  Oz’s ears come to a point. His long nose reminds me of a fox. His English is good, with only the trace of a dancing accent.

  I try the cheese. “Are you French?”

  “Right now, I am Czech.” Oz points to an item on the hot menu. “This you will like.”

  “What is it?”

  “You and your wife are in Prague on vacation?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Ah,” says Oz. “Also business?”

  I try to imagine how I would explain a lost relative and a medicine bundle to a wizard in Prague. “We’re looking for something.”

  “Something. Yes.” Oz leans forward on the table. When he does, I can see that he has a watch on each wrist. “That is for what we are all looking.”

  There are three choices on the hot menu. When the woman comes by with coffee, I point to the second item.

  “There is much in Prague to find,” says Oz. “Do you know about windows?”

  “Windows?”

  “In Prague, they throw politicians out windows,” says Oz. “Defenestrations. This is the word, yes? 1419, 1618, and 1948.”

  I look at the clock on the wall and wonder if Mimi is still in bed.

  “In the first defenestration, seven members of council are thrown out the windows of the town hall. They land on pikes. Most unfortunate.”

  If she’s not careful, she’ll miss breakfast.

  “In the second defenestration, government officials are thrown out windows into a moat.” Oz pauses and sips at his coffee. “They land on piles of manure and survive.”

  I could call the room and remind her of the time constraints regarding morning meals at the hotel.

  “In the third defenestration,” Oz continues, “Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, is thrown out a window to his death by Soviet Communists, who claim it is suicide.”

  Or I could just do nothing. Missing a meal might be an effective object lesson in punctuality.

  “Of course, tossing politicians out windows is reasonable, yes?” Oz holds out his wrists. The two watches are about the same size. “Compared to carpet bombings and drone strikes? Sarin gas and napalm? Nuclear missiles and the World Bank?”

  One watch has a cream face with numbers the colour of winter ice. The other has a brilliant green face with gold hands.

  “Both of these are watches.” Oz crosses his wrists back and forth, as though he’s running a shell game. “But one is also a state of mind.”

  I would have added religious intolerance and racism to Oz’s list. Though to be fair, religious intolerance and racism aren’t the methods by which we kill people we don’t like. They just provide the narrative and the incentive.

  “Can you tell which is which?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Ah,” says Oz. “A philosopher. Perhaps you can help me. Do you play games?”

  “Games?”

  “Excellent,” says Oz. “Then you will have no preconceived ideas.”

  “Games? Is that what you do?”

  Oz puts his napkin on the table and buttons his jacket. “Take your wife to the Franz Kafka Museum,” he says. “It is close. You will enjoy the Cerny sculpture in the courtyard.”

  The little man is through the breakfast room and gone like a wisp of smoke just as Mimi appears in the doorway, looking slightly dishevelled and lost.

  “Over here.” I wave.

  She waves back but goes directly to the buffet and begins piling food on her plate. There is nothing that the woman won’t eat, and she is always hungry. Her mother is the same way. I’ve seen Bernie Bull Shield go up and down the line of hot trays at the Happy Fortune in Lethbridge like a harvester through hay.

  “See,” Mimi says when she arrives at the table, “still lots of good stuff left.”

  I hand her the menu. “In addition to the buffet, you can order one of the hot items as well.”

  “So, are you all set for our big adventure?”

  “You mean putting in time wandering a strange city, looking at old, boring buildings, hoping someone speaks English?”

  “That’s the one.”

  MIMI’S MOTHER LIVES by herself in a double-wide trailer on the
Blackfoot reserve in southern Alberta. You can sit on her porch and watch the Rockies turn evening purple and wake up to see the Belly River, thin and silver, as it cuts its way through the prairies.

  Bernice, or Bernie as she prefers, is a large, sturdy woman who keeps herself well supplied with strong opinions, and every time we visit, she shares them with us.

  “Wouldn’t hurt you to move back to the reserve,” she would tell Mimi. “Traditionally, Blackfoot women brought their men home to live with their mother’s family.”

  “No, they didn’t, Mum.”

  “You remember that story I told you about fishing?”

  “God, Mum, not that one again.”

  “Men are like fish,” Bernie would start. “No real skill needed. Drop a line in the water and wait. But just because you catch one doesn’t mean you have to keep it.”

  Sometimes Bernie would try to be helpful. “We should get your man an Indian name.”

  “I have an Indian name.”

  “Blackbird is okay, but Mavrias don’t sound much Indian to me.”

  “It’s not,” I would say each time she brought it up.

  “And we’re not supposed to be in the same room. If you were Blackfoot, you’d know that.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Mum.”

  “In the old days, you’d have to make amends by giving me a horse.”

  “Bird is not going to get you a horse.”

  “But seeing as we’re modern Indians, I’ll settle for a used pickup.”

  “Be nice,” Mimi would tell her mother. “Remember, it was Bird who insisted that we name Tally after Grandma.”

  “And if you lived on the reserve, I could help raise my grandkids. Who’s going to teach them to speak Blackfoot?”

  Our conversation generally followed the same pattern. In the end, she’d remind me that since I was part of the family, I’d need to learn the stories. Which was the way she would always begin the saga of Uncle Leroy and the Crow bundle.

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. In the breakfast room of the hotel. Mimi eats with one hand and works the guidebook with the other.

  “What do you want to do?” she asks.

  This is a rhetorical question.

  “For example, we could go to Old Town Square and see the astronomical clock.”

  My hot entree arrives. It’s a thin slice of ham sandwiched between a piece of cheese and a fried egg on some kind of flatbread.

  “We could go to the castle.”

  I try it, and it’s good, especially the cheese.

  “There’s the Dancing House.” Mimi helps herself to my entree. “We could also go to the Prague Zoo, but you don’t like zoos.”

  “Neither do you.” I try to fend off the assault on my breakfast. “What about the bundle?”

  “We could check out the National Museum.” Mimi consults her map. “See if they have ever heard of Leroy Bull Shield.”

  “Sure.”

  “Course, you hate museums too.”

  “They’re pretty much all the same.”

  “Maybe Prague has a typewriter museum. You’d like that. You could buy a postcard and send it to that typewriter friend of yours.” Mimi spears a piece of pineapple off my plate with her fork. “What’s her name?”

  I lean on the table and try to protect my food with my forearm.

  “And look at this,” says Mimi. “There’s a Sex Machines Museum. Tell me you don’t want to see that.”

  “You know you’re eating my breakfast.”

  “You’re not eating it.” Mimi closes the guidebook. “Stop changing the subject. You know the first thing I want to do?”

  “I was taking my time. I don’t gulp my food.”

  “I want to walk the Charles Bridge.”

  “We walked it last night.”

  “That was in the dark.” Mimi licks her fork. “Come on. Everything always looks different in the light.”

  LEROY BULL SHIELD was the black sheep of the Bull Shield family, and every time we went to Standoff to visit, Mimi’s mother would sit me down at the kitchen table and tell me the story.

  “Leroy was real adventurous,” Bernie would begin. “Couldn’t sit still. Always running off. Those days, you had to have a pass to leave the reserve, but that didn’t bother Leroy. He’d get on his horse and just go. One time, he rode all the way to Missoula.”

  Mimi and I had driven down to Missoula for the big powwow. From Standoff, it had taken us over six hours. I looked up the distance on the Internet and checked it against the speed of an average horse over flat ground.

  “You two should try that sometime,” Bernice would say. “Borrow a couple of horses from the Goodstrikers.”

  “Bird isn’t really a horse person,” Mimi would tell her mother.

  “That must be the Greek side.”

  “I like horses.”

  “Sure,” Mimi would concede. “You just don’t like to ride them.”

  Five days. So far as I could figure, it would have taken Leroy at least five days to make the trip. And that was in the early 1900s, when you couldn’t pull over for a coffee in Cardston or bed down for the night at the Red Eagle Motel in St. Mary.

  “He’d go to Great Falls as well,” Bernie told us. “Man didn’t like to stay home.”

  “Tell Bird about the Crow bundle.”

  “Why doesn’t this husband of yours like horses?”

  Mimi and I went to Yellowstone one year. We had been out to Standoff to visit Bernie and decided to drop down into the States to see the park. Those were the days when we were young and fit. We watched Old Faithful erupt, toured the hot springs, jogged up the side of Mount Washburn, saw the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and signed up for a horseback ride.

  “Leroy disappeared round the same time those idiot railroad people blew up the side of the mountain and destroyed all those salmon.”

  “That was later,” Mimi would correct her mother. “That happened in 1913. On the Fraser River.”

  “Who’s telling this story?”

  The Yellowstone Lodge offered two rides. The Roosevelt and the Canyon. The one-hour ride cost fifty dollars, while the two-hour ride cost seventy-three. Mimi chose the two-hour Canyon ride, which went along the rim of Cascade Canyon and through a series of mountain meadows.

  A romantic adventure. Indians on horses under a high Wyoming sky, and for the next two days, I wasn’t able to walk.

  Bernie liked to come at the story of Uncle Leroy from different angles.

  “Back in the day, we had this Indian agent. Name was Nelson or Wilson. Something like that. He lived on the reserve. So he could look after us Indians. You get the picture?”

  I would nod and tell Bernie that, yes, I got the picture.

  “Nelson or Wilson wasn’t all that charming. Some of the people liked him okay, and some of the people didn’t. He could be pushy. He liked to order folks around. Some of us didn’t mind, and some of us did. You keeping up?”

  I would nod and tell Bernie that, yes, I was keeping up.

  “And one of the people who didn’t much care for Nelson or Wilson and didn’t like to be ordered around by some government gasbag was Leroy Bull Shield.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. On the Charles Bridge.

  Mimi already has her guidebook open. “The bridge is famous for its statues of saints.”

  “Great.”

  “There are thirty in all.”

  While Mimi reads the book, I watch the tourists as they crowd around the statues. Some saints are more popular than others.

  “There’s St. Francis of Assisi and St. Wenceslas and St. Anne.”

  All of the statues are weathered and black, but some have spots that have been rubbed golden.

  “St. Joseph, St. Vitus, St. Christopher.”

  Evidently, one of the tourist activities in Prague is statue rubbing.

  “This is disappointing.” Mimi looks up from her guidebook. “It says that most of the statues are replicas.”

  There are three plaqu
es at the base of one of the statues. The first plaque shows a knight, a woman, and a child, while in the background, a group of soldiers are throwing a figure off the bridge.

  “That’s St. John of Nepomuk,” Mimi tells me. “He’s the patron saint of Prague. King Wenceslas had him killed because Nepomuk wouldn’t tell him what the queen had talked about in the confessional.”

  The second plaque is a bunch of writing that I can’t read. The third plaque shows a knight petting a dog that has been rubbed golden.

  “Touching the falling priest is supposed to bring good luck.”

  “What about the dog?”

  Mimi gives me a hug. “I knew we should have brought Muffy.”

  AT SOME POINT in the story of Uncle Leroy and the Crow bundle, Bernie would touch on the drinking.

  “Leroy was no drunk,” she would say, “but he did drink. And Mr. Nelson or Wilson was one of those born-againers. Man thought he could talk to god when he was really just mumbling to himself. Drinking, according to Mr. Indian agent, led to singing, and singing led to dancing. Man would have banned laughing. Would have made smiling a hanging offence.

  “One year, this Wilson or Nelson organized a sports day at the same time as the Sun Dance, to try to lure people away from Belly Buttes. And he ordered the buffalo tongues mutilated, so that the women couldn’t use them in the ceremony.”

  “You never knew the man,” Mimi reminded her mother. “You weren’t even born yet.”

  “Stories don’t die. Stories stay alive so long as they’re told.”

  Bernie would make another pot of coffee and break out the special chocolate-covered cookies as she worked her way to the heart of the matter.

  “There was this bootlegger from around Missoula. Donald somebody. Like the duck. Drug dealer. Back then it was alcohol. Today it’s other stuff. So, Donald the Duck would bring his booze onto the reserve, and Leroy would find him or he would find Leroy. Didn’t much matter. The result was always the same. Leroy would get drunk, and when he got drunk, he would do something stupid.”

  “This is where Uncle Leroy paints the guy’s house?”

  “Stop getting ahead of the story. I raised you better than that.”

  Sometimes Bernie would tell the story quick, and sometimes she would draw it out.