"Who here is undocumented?" Jona asked glumly.
A very young boy kneeling by a milk drum stuck his hand into the air. The freight car shunted and rattled. We took off again.
* * * * *
Jona's legs wobbled when we walked through Winnipeg. I didn't blame him. I never wanted to travel by train again.
"Where are we going?" Jona asked.
"Not sure yet," I said.
Colored plastic awnings flapped in the wind. Market stalls stood underneath them. Ahead of us was a giant glass tower, a white and red flag flying high over its peak. I wondered who lived there, how they could stand it. The sky was blank and white but there was no snow in the sky, no snow on the paved ground, not a drop of it floating down the quiet, lazy river.
Jona stretched himself tall. He felt my forehead with the palm of his hand. What he didn't say out loud he said with his eyes, the sharp spark of panic, the bloodshot veins.
"I'm fine," I told him, for the millionth time.
"Do you want to sit?" Jona asked.
"Do you?" I returned.
"I'll get you something to eat..."
"Let's just look for Aboriginal Affairs."
We asked a couple of the vendors if they knew where the office building was. None of them did. I didn't like the dark looks most of them gave us, like they could tell we didn't belong here and we'd sneaked our way in. It was only noon but the square was full of women in pin curls and pointy heels, racing back and forth for their bargains. I wondered if there was some kind of holiday going on. I'd lost track of the days.
"What are we going to do?" Jona asked.
We walked farther along the silent river. The water was muddy where it lapped over a cobbled sandstone walkway. As soon as I saw that walkway I froze. I knew exactly where I was.
"This is the Red River of the North," I said.
"Huh?" Jona asked, hands in the pockets of his capote.
I'd never been to Winnipeg before but I knew the river from my mother's stories. Back when we belonged to the Iron Confederacy--the Natimiyiniwak, the Upstream Cree--we used to meet here every month with our allies, the Nakota, the Ojibway. In summer the clay on the riverbed broke loose and floated to the surface. The water turned red.
"That's the Riverwalk," I said. I looked at the cobbled walkway. "We put those stones there. We built that."
Six thousand years ago. It was like a daydream. It was like watching a fairy tale spill over into the real world. Princes really rescued princesses. Dragons really breathed fire.
A man rushing past spat his chewing gum on the sandstone facade. He wiped his slimy mouth with the back of his hand.
"Guav cha dha!" Jona shouted after him, incensed.
I stared at the gum wad, blue and frothy with spit. It belonged there, I realized. I was the one who didn't belong. When your father kicks you out of his house, changes the locks and throws out your clothes, you don't just force your way back in. You aren't his son anymore. It doesn't matter how much you love him. It doesn't matter that you've mopped the vomit from his face when he was drunk, that you've tied his shoelaces when he was too bleary-eyed to see straight. He called you a Mistake when you were twelve years old. That's all you'll ever be to him.
* * * * *
We found the Aboriginal Affairs office in downtown Winnipeg. It was a single block of cubicles smashed into the corner of a much larger, much busier office building. A grand total of two people were working the desks. Neither of them was actually aboriginal.
I stepped up to a woman in a green sweater and she told me the waiting time was half an hour.
"But there's no one else here," Jona said, staring.
"Half an hour," the woman repeated.
We went over to the bench beside the partition and we sat on it. Jona was positively livid. I'd never seen him like this before. I put the whale leather bag between my ankles. Every second these moniyawak made me wait was another second my little boy spent without his father, his home. I didn't know where he was or what was happening to him. I was so scared, I could have picked up the bench underneath me and smashed it to pieces.
"Ja Develeskey," Jona muttered. "Az Develeskey."
He was praying again.
"I'm not sick," I told him.
"Stop," he said sharply. Just then he sounded like my squad leader. "We need God. We can't do anything without God. We can't even breathe without God."
I slid my hand against his, threaded our fingers together and held on tight. The woman in the green sweater stared at us. I guess she didn't like what she saw, because she suddenly found some time to take our inquiry. She called us over to her cubicle and we sat across from her. She opened a tinny drawer.
"Where is Norway House?" I asked her.
She made me repeat myself--twice. She pulled a rubber band off a stack of catalogue cards, combed slowly through the residential school listing. Jona squeezed my hand between our chairs.
"No Norway House," the lady told me.
"There has to be," I said at once.
"Says who?"
I thought I could have screamed. "The BIA, on Qanuk Island. My son is in Norway House. Where is Norway House?"
"BIA?" the woman repeated. "You from the US?"
"Yes," I said wearily.
"Then why would your kid be in Canada?"
I was screaming on the inside. I couldn't scream on the outside. I'd never done it before; I didn't know how.
"Look, lady," Jona said. His voice was low and even but it carried a slight tremor. "The BIA sent his kid to Manitoba. That's not being debated here. The name they gave us was Norway House. Maybe they gave us the wrong name; I don't know. If it's not Norway House, it's some other school. You need to look through the records. You need to find this kid. We already gave you his name. We already told you he's in Manitoba."
"Give me his name again," the woman said. She slid a pair of glasses on over her eyes, masking her annoyance.
It was no use. She looked through three different catalogues and she swore there was no Norway House; she swore there was no little Cree boy named Wapos going to school in Manitoba. Yelling at her wouldn't have changed anything. The inside of my throat felt cold; the blood moved slowly in my veins. The room dipped and darkened and lurched around me. My ears were ringing with pain. I don't remember whether I thanked the lady before I grabbed my leather sack and strode out of the office cubicle.
"Orca," Jona said, hurrying after me.
I made it as far as the second floor of the office building. I hit my knees on the hard floor and I cried like a baby. My baby. Someone had stolen my baby and I didn't know where he was. If I didn't know where he was I had no guarantee they'd give him back to me. If they gave him back to me it wouldn't be in one piece. They'd given me my father in shambles, a shadow of a man who hated himself so passionately he had no choice but to leave the home that made him. My father in shambles. My country in shambles. My baby. My baby was gone. They'd ripped him out of my arms and tossed him into some chasm and I didn't know who They were.
Jona pulled me off the floor. He smoothed his hands over my face. My cheeks felt cold when he wiped my tears away.
"Don't you cry," he said solemnly. "Don't. I'm going to find him. He's here. I don't know why they're lying, but he's here. I'm going to find him. You follow me, Orca. Don't worry about anything. Don't think about anything. Pretend we're back in Ardennes. Pretend we're still a fireteam."
"Jona," I said. My voice sounded thick. "I'm going to throw up."
"Swallow it," Jona said. "You can do it. You're a soldier."
Vomit welled up through my throat. I forced it back down. I didn't know what had done that: raw fear, or radiation sickness. It finally hit me that I was dying. You don't survive radiation poisoning. You don't survive leukemia. I was going to die and then my son wouldn't have a father, whether we managed to find him or not. We didn't have fathers, my son and I. We were America's bastard children, only wanted when it was convenient, when someone needed to die
for a fake war or clean up the vomit on the kitchen table.
Jona took my face in his hands and kissed me. I didn't know how he could bear to, the acrid poison taste lingering on my lips. He let go of me when a balding man rounded the corner and strode past us, swinging a keychain around his finger.
"I'll find your boy," Jona told me. "And we'll all go home, and you'll get better. You have to. You don't understand. God gave you to me. He can't take you away. I will tear him out of the sky before I let him take you away."
* * * * *
At night Jona decided we were going gambling. I didn't question it. I didn't care. I couldn't think about anything except my little boy with short hair, my little boy wearing white boys' clothes, the Indian beaten out of him, the spark beaten out of his eyes. I'd named him Rabbit because Rabbit was the best and craftiest of Wakoomakun, our animal kin. It was a Rabbit who had given us this blessed country, this Turtle Island. It was a Rabbit who had given us Day and Night when he settled the age-old rivalry between Sister Sun and Brother Moon. The white men didn't understand that. I was afraid my son's teachers was going to hear the name Rabbit and deride him for being a filthy animal. It wasn't as if we could help it, they would reason. Indians were animals. Indians were vermin. Kill the Indian, Save the Man.
They probably weren't calling him Rabbit anymore. They were probably calling him Ted now, or James, or Anthony. He'd probably cried and cried for his father to come and get him and they'd probably slapped his head and told him that he should give up; that he had been abandoned. "Nobody wants you," they'd say.
"Nobody wanted me," my dad told me.
I was eight years old. My grandfather had just passed away. Mom was beside herself over her father's death. It was one of those rare moments when Dad was kind enough to get me out of the house so she could cry in private. Dad took me to the warm springs and we sat with our legs in the steaming water, snowflakes swirling around our shoulders.
"Those teachers sure as hell didn't want me there," Dad said. He had burly shoulders, his hair severe and short. He had a cigarette in his mouth. Real Indians don't smoke cigarettes. I guess he was making a statement. "Amount of times they boxed my ears in when I wasn't even ready for it. Hot pokers through your fingers if you didn't write your cursive fast enough. They'd take a bar of soap and boil it down and make you drink it scalding hot. If you were lucky you threw it up, but it got the job done, didn't it? Couldn't talk for weeks. They fucking hated us kids, only kept us around because they wanted something to beat up on. But you know something?"
No, I didn't know something. I didn't want to know something. I stared at the bubbling bright water. I thought if I memorized the sound of it, the smell of it, I could use it as a kind of wall. I could climb that wall, or else hide behind it, the way I always felt like hiding when Dad went off on his tirades.
"They didn't want me," Dad said quietly. "My ma, my old man. They could have come and got me and took me home. But they didn't. They left me there to rot. And that's how I know. That's how I know I got the better end of the deal. Sure, I've got scars on my fingers. I can't get out of bed in the morning without my back giving out. But my ma and my dad, they didn't want me any more than those nuns and those teachers did. And fuck them for it. Fucking Indians. If I have to live to be two hundred I'll never be an Indian."
"But you're brown," I said.
"What?" Dad said.
"You," I said. "You're brown."
Dad sucked on his cigarette, like if he breathed in enough of the white man's poison his skin would turn white, his hair would turn white, his eyes would turn white and roll out of his head and then he wouldn't have to see himself in the mirror anymore.
"Wanna smoke?" Dad asked.
"No," I said. Indians don't smoke cigarettes.
"Orca."
It wasn't my dad's voice. I jolted. Jona had his hand around mine. He pulled me down a dank alley, out onto a wet street. I wasn't sure how he knew where he was going, how we had even gotten here. I was locked inside my own head, trapped between the ghosts of the past, the ghosts of the future.
"Here," Jona said.
Outside a boarded storefront he shouldered open a rotted wood door. We ducked under hanging plasters. A rat scurried past us. We emerged in a back room full of cigarette smoke and aftershave. A tiny radio with a long antenna spat gibberish from atop a side partition. Assorted men sat scattered around a folding table, a woman with gray hair pouring their drinks.
"American money okay?" Jona asked, taking off his coat.
He sat down with the men. I couldn't bring myself to do the same. I sat on the floor by a mountain of coats, my eyes glassy, my throat hot. I felt like I could vomit up everything I'd never eaten in the past four days. I felt like I could rip apart time and space to get to my boy, if only my joints would stop hurting long enough.
"I'll open," someone said.
The lady with the drinks circled around the table. Every time she passed by a man with a bushy mustache she palmed his shoulder, very briefly. I felt they were cheating somehow--that same man kept winning every other round--but I guess that's part and parcel with a card game. I listened to the radio with half an ear. Some Canadian news anchor said McCarthy was arresting Hollywood screenwriters now. Samuel Ornitz, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman. More Jews. "Arrested on suspicion of un-American activities," the anchor clarified. What constituted an American activity? Stealing people's homes, I guessed. Stealing people's children right out of their arms. I wanted to laugh until bile came out of my mouth. So it was against the law now not to be American. No wonder we'd bombed so many Japanese civilians. It wasn't about the war; it was about protecting the good old American Dream.
Jona hummed underneath his breath. He studied the cards in his hand. Chips moved across the grimy table and the humming turned into a real song.
"Oyde parudyan man pe'l lovende," he sang quietly.
I'd heard this song before. The memory was vague at first; but the more Jona sang I remembered it was the song he'd sung in Jasenovac, in the concentration camp. It was the song his brothers and sister had sung when they were killed.
The woman with the drinks came to a halt. She exchanged a look with the bushy-faced man. It was so brief I might have imagined it. The man won the next round, like nothing had happened. The woman poured herself a scotch. She leaned back against the peeling wall and laughed when a slip of a boy tried to buy her services. She was old enough to be his mother, prettier than a girl half her age.
It was when the rest of gamblers had gone home for the night--most of them penniless--that the woman drew the dirty curtains shut on the window above the pull toilet; that the man took two long, deep breaths, and looked at Jona, and said:
"How much did you gamble? Come take it back."
"You Cigani?" Jona asked.
"Lovari," said the gray-haired woman.
The man got up and turned off the radio. He had watery eyes, a bony chin. He scratched at his mustache like he was trying to scratch it right off his face. The woman tucked her gray curls behind her ears, sat at the beer-stained table. Her skin was earthy and gold, her wrinkles few.
Jona yanked his sleeve up over his scratched arm and the whole room--all four of us--held a collective breath. He showed the strangers his prisoner's stamp; and then they rolled their sleeves up and did the same.
"When were you in Jasenovac?" the woman asked hurriedly.
It was a two-way conversation between Jona and the Lovari woman. They tossed frantic words back and forth at one another in English, in whatever language it was that Gypsies usually spoke. The woman's eyes filled with tears until she blinked them away and forced a raucous laugh. She banged her fist on the table and the man at her side jumped.
"Daje," he muttered.
Jona turned to me. "Where there's a card game," he explained, "there's always a Gypsy."
I nodded, or tried. Without the mountain of coats to lean against I laid my head against the dirty wall. I wanted to sleep for centuries. I w
anted to wake up with my little boy in my arms.
"We're looking for a place called Norway House," I heard Jona say. His voice grew distant, then closer, then distant again. My head was spinning. "It's supposed to be a school. Government run. They took my friend's kid."
"Someone back at the kumpania might know," the woman murmured thoughtfully.
"Yazma might," the man offered somberly.
"Ah, yes," the woman said. "Government types, their indiscretions..."
I opened my eyes. The whole room was splotchy with darkness, but in that contradictory way, too bright. My head pounded.
"That one doesn't look so good," the woman said, nodding at me.
"No," Jona said quietly. "No, he's not... If you have a drabani--"
"Maybe," said the woman. "We'll see."
They cleaned up. The man, whose name was Tavu, gave Jona back his money. The woman, Tavu's mother, packed up all the little lamps but didn't bother locking the building. I wondered if they really owned this place. We went out into the alley and the street was pitch black. But Jona had pale eyes, Fox eyes; and his companions had the same. I held onto Jona's wrist and the whale leather sack and stumbled through shadow. Whales don't see very well, much less in the dark. We're only good at listening.
Outside Winnipeg a badly lit turnpike ran beside a tangle of trees. Intermittent cars zipped up and down the pavement. We waited until they'd gone and we crossed the road. The trees were dripping, shivering, Burr oaks with leaves like Christmas stars. They swayed over our heads and we walked through them and over to a pair of locked and rusted gates. We climbed the gates with ease, even Harlani, who was fifty-five years old and complained of a bad hip.
The park had one of those stone water fountains. The water in the basin was frozen solid. We walked for a while past the plastic white benches, the tire swings. We walked past the public bathrooms and the Burr oaks opened up again, and dozens and dozens of colored wagons stared back at me, horses and mules sleeping beneath the yokes.