Country of the Assinipoels

Jeff B. Willey

Blazed on four sides we’ve been walking for hours, everything at the edge of death on the indifferent prairie.  Husks of creatures holding just enough moisture to maybe crawl a bit more, seek out shade and hold on to life.  “Out here you’re only as rich as the water you got” says Lachoice, my associate, “let’s go this way.”  The land looks as if a mountain of acid had gushed over it mutilating everything into a patchwork of nodules and scoured rivulets, blackened spillways contrasting with salt-white precipitates and red samphire.  Why am I out here like this?  I begin to question my following of this man.  What are his credentials to lead?  Stumbling forth my mind returns to the events that led us here.
…..The excursion began days prior in Lachoice’s car as we bombed south to the district of Assiniboia and the lands of his mother’s side.  Lachoice was to reunite with kin not seen in ages and he had arranged for us to see a medicine man for healing.  We were also laying low from the Ukrainian-Canadian mafia.  Yes the Ukrainian-Canadian mafia, with major sites of operation along the borscht belt of the northern plains, said to have their hands in several lucrative pots including crops, heifers, video lottery, uranium, diamonds and of course the potash corporation.  I didn’t reveal any of these motives to Mara, the woman in my life, for I am weak and chose the easy way that in the end would be a hard road.
…..Even in this carbon-cooked air, even with cheaper means of transport available Lachoice held to combustion and propulsion with a foot to the pedal.  Fossil-cookers some would call us.  Our trail cut across the glacial uplift of the Missouri Coteau.  Hawk on a fence post scanning the salt flats as our car skirted the alkali.  We neared a parcel of land occupied by a colony of communal farmers.  Rows of long buildings in the distance sat in close proximity to abattoirs.  “Those are the barracks they live in” claimed Lachoice, “women in one, men in the other.”  I asked if they were polygamous but he didn’t know.
…..There were stranger inhabitants in the area.  We spotted a pair of rubber boots embedded upside down in a ditch.  Lachoice said they belonged to a local named Old Cyr.  They were meant as a warning sign at the periphery of his property, as if to demonstrate that he sent the man wearing them straight to hell and with him his meddling ways.  “No one’s seen him much since the incident a few years back.  Some kids from the township over heard about what the recluse might be hiding in his old grain bins.  He blew their windshield out they’re lucky to be alive.  Some people say he keeps a haul of moneyrock stashed away, stolen from derailed freight on the atomic highway.  Whatever it is he’s guarding it with his life the crazy bastard.”
…..Surging on we caught a flash of the great river carving the Coteau, the drainage of mountains far to the west.  Razor ridges nestled jade coulees in their lap.  We set first night’s camp among ochre-tinged land forms drinking river-chilled beer and dining on bush pies slow-cooked over glowing coals.  I asked Lachoice where it was we were going.  “I’m not sure yet” he answered.  “Well I know the general area.  At some point we’ll have to go out looking for them.”  “What do you mean go out looking?”  It was only then that Lachoice explained that his kindred were semi-nomadic and could at this time of year be anywhere out on the vast prairie of southern Saskatchewan.
…..Land drying up the further south we went.  Old sand hills grown with stubble and clumps of yellowed vegetation, a few wayward cattle.  The earth was disproportionately exceeded by wide margins of heaven and the sky bed suspended above threatened to smother us in blue death.  The domination of Father Sky had the land fleeing in all directions, some of it balled up in fear creating what they call erratics.  The highway edged past an abandoned country hall, its horsehair dance floor waiting in futility for stomping revelers who would never return.  Raucous childhood memories from such places, like the crazy uncle who snorted cocaine and split his pants at a wedding dance.
…..Further still we came to the Whitemud River and followed it snaking through an erosional valley.  Prairie expanded in all directions from the valley rim marathoning to the horizon some sixty miles away where giant sand dunes formed little bumps on the edge of the world.  We pulled over to relieve ourselves.  Coyotes prowled at our backs on a ninety foot perimeter, quicker than our vision but we could feel them.  “Does Mara know about our little trip?” Lachoice asked.  “She knows we’re on the road.  She thinks we’re going up to the cabin.”
…..We pulled into the town of Dollarhead that afternoon.  Its collapsing main street boasted Duke’s Hotel and Chinese Restaurant.  Happy Hour 11am-11pm.  $2.50 beer and shots.  18 wing flavours.  A harvest grain rush of family fashions.  Burning down the main drag a cowboy turned his head to scan us.  At the far end he pulled a U-ball and came back, twang sliding out his window, and repeated this at the other end.  Did this over and over, one of the big bucks of this town.
…..We stepped into the Chinese restaurant for pizza.  Ants crawling up the walls and over the tables.  The waitress squished them with her rag and wiped the table for us.  Sitting across from Lachoice I realized we had avoided all serious conversation to that point.  I wanted to ask him how business was going, how close he was to recouping his debt, but this was a sensitive subject.  It was a little over a year ago when Lachoice launched his big scam.  His prescription bingo website would draw in unsuspecting senior citizens with small cash prizes and a “no-risk offer” of useless online diagnostic tests and free or heavily discounted pharmaceuticals based on information collected from his victims.  He needed seed money and a little too casually I put him in touch with a cousin with connections, who in turn introduced him to the Uke mob from which he successfully attained financing.  But there just weren’t enough web-savvy seniors to make it profitable and feeling the heat he shut it down early before realizing the projected earnings.  Some are of the opinion that Lachoice deserved the beat-down and ransacking he received for his ignorance.  Now he owes what was squandered and I am a subsidiary party.
…..We bartered a room for 45 bones at the Dusty Star motel.  Trophy from a World War II soapbox derby in the lobby, complementary warm hot tub and ice pool next to the office, a toaster with free bread.  We kicked off our shoes and crashed on the double beds, disturbed to find a love swing suspended in our room.  Lachoice lit kif and passed it.  Child evangelism on the 19 inch screen.  Paranoia pressed me to the window: there were others.  Were we being followed?  A man cruising a Prowler holiday trailer that slept six comfortably.  Retreating to the bathroom I killed a pestering bug with a bar of soap, what they call a clean kill.
…..We found a saloon featuring a band from the eastern fingers of the Rockies.  Inside the citizenry smelled of garlic sausage and we drank with them.  Banjo, guitar, and a set of booming oversized barrel drums with rattling cowbell rack.  I noticed a sour-faced man in the apparel of a city dweller who looked out of place.  I caught him staring at us more than once but Lachoice shrugged it off.  We downed rabbit pilsner, hung, talked, girls, looked, stuttered, looked away, blinked, smiled, empathy, regret, sleep.
…..Continued on past things withering along the road.  A house tottering for more than a century was giving itself back up to gravity and sinking into the land, its bleached skeleton arrested in a moment of eventual release.  Lachoice noticed something about a half hour out of town and picked up speed.  Behind us was a car with two people and I thought one of them might be the man I saw in town.  They bumped us, whiplashing us forward.  Lachoice pinned it while opening the glove box to retrieve a handgun I had no idea was in there, tossing it in my lap.  150 clicks down the asphalt but I was frozen in place.  I looked back again and the man on the passenger side was pointing vigorously to his right, a command to pull over.  At that point and just as an oncoming car passed us Lachoice broke into a sliding donut arcing the car across the rubber-melting pavement.  My head slammed into the window and the gun careened away.  Screeching to an almost but not complete stop Lachoice throttled the opposite direction in a blur of white letter tires.  We shot past a low rise and put a few high speed miles behind us, Lachoice’s eyes glued to the rearview.
…..We tore on, taking random turns down back roads and correction lines.  “Who was that?”  “Who do you think.”  “See I wasn’t being paranoid, I told you we were being followed.”  “Yeah well they aren’t gonna find us now.”
…..With no campgrounds in sight we took shelter at a rancher’s homestead for a small fee.  The rancher’s wife was kind enough to provide a bag of ice and I sat with it pressed to my head as the sky went red to purple before falling off the spectrum.  In the middle of the night I awoke to the sound of the wind picking up.  Eyes opened I listened intently to the winds bounding gullies and swashbuckling the hills surrounding our tent.  The sound of their advance was magnified in waves from hill to coulee, a speeding and decelerating poltergeist that had me pinned on my back in fear, unable to move.  I could make out individual winds circling us, flying here there then back the other way as I clenched my eyes shut.  They receded just as abruptly, but sleep was not easily won back.
……In a morning passage east over the Hiccup Hills I told Lachoice about the wind.  He just nodded.  But minutes later he said, “the shaman will want to know about that.”  Our supplies were running low just as we reached the most desolate part of the region.  We passed through towns that no longer existed, where even the ghosts had moved on.  In one village we peered into crumbling buildings with no trace of anyone just the word Croatoan scrawled on a wall.
…..As we came to know despair salvation was arrived upon: a rodeo.  We gladly pulled in and struck up conversation with an old ranch hand who pointed to the timber bleachers he had helped build and declared there would be roping today.  We devoured french fries and gravy from the concession stand with coffee and ice cream for dessert.
…..Dirt horizon.  Lachoice would mumble that we were close.  Staring through a film of bug guts gummed on the windshield the prairie roiled up again as we entered its wooden uplands.  South over the toe of a sinking mesa delivered us within sight of an abandoned ranch.  Lachoice stopped the car.  “We’ll leave it here” he said, “it can’t get us any closer.  Get your things ready.”  I asked which way we were going, how we were going to find them, but he only gestured imprecisely.
…..We set out along the rim of a plateau for a point on the horizon, the open fields gathering up to hills on one side and fissuring into badlands on the other.  The place had taken an elemental beating, the earth shriveled into weirdness.  Prickly pear cactus and clumps of sparse broomweed populated the dry sun-facing slopes.  Rock formations like ancient flying saucers grounded and parked in this otherworld airport, long since petrified.
…..Prey there on an animal trail, the sleek miniature pelt of a field mouse but no it had already been shit out of something else.  Our path wove between conical protrusions of rock, giant tops flung by a godling playing eons ago before losing interest and wandering off.  We headed up a draw where a golden eagle patrolled a gap in the broken hills, she the flying overlord of prairie dogs who yelped communications from submerged cities.
…..Having had enough of my own thoughts I tried sparking conversation with Lachoice.  “So your relatives, how long have they been back out here, living like this?”  “A generation or so.  My cousins grew up when they were starting to reclaim the life.  Not even the elders remembered everything that went with the old ways, how to live.  They had to research things.  My uncle was telling me they use both new and traditional gear, composite bows and hide parfleches, things like that.”
…..We spent that night in the mouth of a cave eating sandwiches purchased from the rodeo concession, a fire lit, the warm darkness beyond of unknown extent.  Lachoice said we were in an old coyote den cleared by outlaws for use in the black medicine trade.  It was time for ghost stories.  Lachoice wanted to talk about hallucinatory states, psychoactivity.  To get me in that head space.  I tried listening, the heat from the campfire stirring a low wind in the mouth of the cave, but my mind kept returning to the car chase.  Did they want us dead?  A whining like a chorus of ghosts from across the plains.  The coyotes were out there, their domain the prairie night and we were but guests.
…..Lachoice went foraging the next morning somewhere to the south, toward the medicine line.  On return he handed over chokecherries and saskatoons, saying the law of the west was not absolute.  We ascended a ridge above a network of coulees and canyons that spidered out for miles.  They were as holes made by the cosmic worm through the fruit of the world, the world later drying and cracking open to reveal its path.  A rock effigy of a giant worm commemorated this primordial feeding.  In those tumbling hills were other tributes in stone to animals like the bison, set down by ancients who had gathered on the same vistas.  Earth slowly swallowing the rocks back up.  According to Lachoice the old ones say this is how it should be, it is the way things come to pass and so is good.  I can almost accept this idea.
…..Which brings us to the here and now under a walloping sun, my lips starting to crack, vision losing its acuity.  What are we doing out here?  Supposedly searching for people who have resumed part-time nomadic living?  Questionable.  And I have no doubt we are lost.  I am about to erupt and let the man know something of my exasperation.  But I should never have doubted him as over the next rise we arrive at a promised hillside spring.  Vegetation stained red where the water spills out of a channel carved long ago.  I dip a hand in and slake my thirst in the coldness.  A distinct taste of iron, like blood.
…..Revitalized we cut a trail through long grasses that lap at our exposed shins, taking up aspen branches to sweep ahead for fear of rattlers.  We mount a steep tabletop for a scan of our surroundings.  The prairie falls away for unimaginable distances, vegetative and geologic patterns playing themselves out across the cactus plain.  The general yellow aridity is fractalated through by coulees green with the lifeblood of water for those who crawl here.  Then we see something far to the west: figures moving like ants on the horizon.  “It’s them” says Lachoice.
…..Aiming for the distant forms we quicken our pace down onto the flats between clumps of greasewood.  The grasslands here are torn to desert, the hills like dried meat.  No roads, no fences, no lines of communication.  Before we close the distance and the ants can reveal their true forms, I have the thought that with each step we are traveling back in time, and such a mechanism may be the only way to undo fate.

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→EMPRISE 17