Canada by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online

narrow dirt and gravel road that headed straight toward the mountains, where the ranch was that my father’s new company hoped to sell. Nothing more than mountain foothills and oceans of wheat lay ahead of us. No houses or trees or people. Ripe wheat stood to the road verges, yellow and thick and rocking in the hot dry breeze that funneled dust through our car windows and left my lips coated. Our father said the Missouri River was to the south of us now. We couldn’t see it because it was down below more bluffs. Lewis and Clark, who we knew about, had come all the way up to here in 1805 and hunted buffalo precisely where we were. However, this was the part of Montana, he said—steering with his left elbow out the window—that resembled the Sahara through a bombardier’s sights, and wasn’t a place where an Alabama native could ever be happy living. He teased Berner and asked if she felt like she was an Alabamian—since he was. She said she didn’t and frowned at me and puckered her lips and made a fish mouth. I told my father I didn’t feel like an Alabamian either, which seemed to amuse him. He said we were Americans, and that was all that mattered. After that we saw a big coyote in the road with a rabbit in its mouth. It paused and looked at our car approaching, then walked into the tall wheat out of sight. We saw what our father said was a golden eagle, poised in the perfectly blue sky, being thwarted by crows wanting to drive it away. We saw three magpies pecking a snake as it hurried to get across the pavement. Our father swerved and ran over it, which made two thump-bumps under the tires and the magpies fly up.
    When we’d driven several miles out this unpaved road with our dust storm behind us, the wheat abruptly ended, and dry, fenced, grazed-over grassland took up, with a few skinny cows standing motionless in the ditches as our car went by. My father slowed and honked his horn, which made the cows kick and snort and shit big streams as they heaved out of the way. “Well, pardon us,” Berner said, watching them from the back seat.
    After a while, we drove past a single, low unpainted wooden house built off the road, flat to the bare ground. Visible a ways farther down the road was another one, and a third one you could barely see in the shimmering, weltering distance. They were dilapidated, as if something bad had happened to them. The first house had no front door or panes in its windows, and the back portion of it had fallen in. Parts of car bodies and a metal bed frame and a standing white refrigerator were moved into the front yard. Chickens bobbed and pecked over the dry ground. Several dogs sat on the steps, observing the road. A white horse wearing a bridle was tethered to a wooden post off to the side of the house. Grasshoppers darted up into the hot air the car displaced. Someone had parked a black-painted semi-trailer in the middle of the field behind the house, and beside it was a smaller panel truck that had HAVRE CARPET painted on its side. A couple of skinny boys—one without his shirt—came to the vacant front doorway and watched us drive past. Berner waved at them and one boy waved back.
    “Those boys are Indians,” my father said. “This is where they’re living. They’re not as lucky as you two. No electric out here.”
    “Why would they live here?” Berner said. She looked out the rear window through the dust at the run-down house and the boys. Nothing about them indicated they were Indians. I knew all Indians didn’t live in teepees and sleep on the ground and wear feathers. No Indians went to the Lewis School that I was aware of. But I knew there were Indians who stayed drunk, and people found them in alleys in winter, frozen to the asphalt. And there were Indians in the sheriff’s office who only handled Indian crimes. I’d thought, though, if you went where Indians lived, they’d look different. These two boys didn’t look any different from me, even though their house