Through Black Spruce

  Just below the beat of the music I recognize something I’ve not heard in a long time. It can’t be, not here. The high-pitched wail of men’s voices tensing, singing in Cree. A powwow song. I even recognize the group. The song works oddly set against the techno noise above it, like it holds the new music up on its shoulders. I look around to see if other people are hearing it, too, but they just keep gyrating, oblivious.

  I look up at the DJ, and he winks at me, motions for me to join him. A bouncer unhooks a velvet rope, and I walk up the steps to this guy. He wears the earphones of his trade around his neck, is busy on his laptop, finding a new song, I guess, before he turns to me.

  “Thought you were Suzanne when you walked in,” he says. It’s nice he doesn’t have to shout to be heard. He’s got brown eyes, and his skin is dark. I guess Spanish. He’s good looking.

  “You know my sister?” I ask.

  He smiles, is the first one not to look like he’s fake. “Oh yeah. Gus, too. Some fine peeps.”

  “Don’t have any idea where they are, do you?” Enough with politeness. I need some answers. He lifts a hand for me to hold on, flutters his fingers over his machine in front of the laptop, adjusts a lever, and the volume increases some.

  “You and me, we should talk sometime,” he says.

  Violet and her posse stand below us now, waving up to him. He nods to the bouncer, who lets them up.

  “Violet isn’t as simple as she comes off,” the DJ says, placing a card in my hand. I stand back to let the girls at him. DJ Butterfoot. I slip downstairs and through the crowd, searching for Gordon. What am I getting myself into?

  I look everywhere but the men’s room. Outside, the air holds a chill I’m surprised by. I wasn’t even smart enough to bring a jacket. I want to start walking home and clear my head a little and try to plot these next days that it looks like I’ll be here, but the simple idea of walking alone makes me panic like I’m drowning. Gordon killed that bastard. He killed him. I made Old Man’s two cronies boil pot after pot of water. His blood covered me. I’ve not allowed myself to come to terms with what has happened yet. Right now, though, I can only function in minutes, maybe an hour at a time.

  Walking away from the club, I hope that Gordon at least knows the name or the intersection of our hotel. He’s gotten along in the world of the streets for who knows how long. He’ll be okay. I need a warm bed and a blanket wrapped around me. I walk toward a busier street up ahead from this quieter one. There will be a cab there. I’ll get back and count the money. What am I to do with it? It is the way for me to get back home.

  I hear the pad of footsteps behind me, not trying to make noise. My head screams. No. Not again. A hand touching my shoulder. I turn. Ready to fight. Fight or drop dead. Gordon stands there in my too-small shirt, holding both hands out in front of him. “Bastard!” I shout.

  15

  NOTHING GOOD

  CAN COME FROM THAT

  You get into a rut over the years. You learn to find a routine that gets you through the days. You start looking at the day-to-day and forget the bigger world around you outside your own head. Before you know it, one, five, ten years have passed. You keep waiting for something, and then one day you wake up and realize. It is simply the end that you’re waiting for. Lisette told me that this is what those TV people call depression. Drinking kept me from it, and drinking is what dug my rut deeper. But I know now what I couldn’t see then.

  The baseball bat attached to the arm that swung it at me on Quarry Road hit me hard enough that my kneecap popped out, and I tore enough tendons that the same doctor in Moose Factory said I wouldn’t walk normal, never mind run, anymore. Anymore. But you know what was good about this, my nieces? Marius Netmaker was the one to get me out of my rut.

  Six weeks in a full leg cast, sitting on my porch, looking at the river, visits from Lisette and Joe and Gregor once in a while. Dorothy took to one or two visits a week, bringing me food and little get-better gifts, she called them. Chocolates and candy, flowers even. She brought me a stuffed bear as a joke, and stayed late enough one night to see my real bear come snuffling around for some old meat I’d left her. Dorothy couldn’t believe it as we sat on the porch holding hands. “Oh my god!” she squealed when I pointed out the sound of the bear cracking through the bush for her meal. Dorothy digging her hand hard into mine and burying her head in my shoulder. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

  I watched my bear sniff the meat, then plop down and begin chewing it up. “No. It’s okay.” We watched that bear, and she asked me questions about it. Some of them I could answer. The rest I made up. Yes, this one seems bigger than most. Yes, she has probably mauled and eaten a few children in her life. No, we can’t run faster than her. By the time our visit on the porch was done, the water taxis weren’t running anymore for the evening, and she had to stay. Don’t worry. Nothing happened. We lay in the same bed and fooled around for a while, me trying to get comfortable with my cast all the way to my upper thigh, aching, itching like a bastard. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. The few pills that the good doctor gave me sat untouched in the bathroom. A second dependence. That’s all I needed.

  Six weeks of sitting or hobbling. Pain. I took the fire that burned in my leg and I let it fuel me, fill me so that I rarely ate anymore. Summer came full on and peaked in black clouds of mosquitoes. Too much rain. Everything wet except my throat. Annie, you were still down south somewhere, gone to where your sister had disappeared. Lisette said you rarely called, and when you did your conversations were brief. You promised to call again soon, to come home soon. You are more like me than you want to admit, Annie. You had found a scent, my niece. You had found a scent and you were on a trail. I worried for you, but I knew you would follow it. You are a hunter, same as me.

  Maybe it is time that you take the role of provider in our family. This has been coming for the last years, anyway, hasn’t it? I’d become useless, a broken man no longer able to do what he pleased. And isn’t this what old age is? Not being able to believe anymore? To no longer go out and do exactly what your gut, not your head, tells you to do?

  Marius had won. I was not bothered by him or by his teenage soldiers in town since they’d broken my leg. When the OPP asked who I thought would do this to me, I simply told them I didn’t know. An accident. This was not their battle, and so my answer to them seemed fine, and final. I guess that Marius had exacted his revenge for an act on my part that I wasn’t clear about. But he had exacted this revenge, and I was broken now.

  My bear. My friend. I sat on the porch in the afternoons, fighting the urge to drink, the urge to smoke, and waited till dusk when she would come. I listened still for the sound of tires on the gravel road that announced a visitor long before he arrived. I kept my Whelen loaded and ready under my chair in case it was Marius and company. I wouldn’t be a victim again. If Marius showed up, I’d shoot him in the chest and stand over him as he died. If he knew me, he knew this.

  I didn’t like being stuck in one place like I was, no ability to walk around anymore, skin under the cast itching worse than the blackfly bites on my arms and scalp. But dusk is when the bear came. She acted all sneaky, but she wasn’t. Deaf ears, blind eyes so that I didn’t know how she’d made it this long. I’d taken to feeding the bear most all the food Lisette and Dorothy brought over for me. This bear, she liked chocolates and pies, I discovered.

  Me, my pain still fed me over those weeks. No appetite. It transferred to my bear. I liked watching her enjoy her meals. I saw the bear struggle sometimes when she walked, bear arthritis screaming in her joints. I considered slipping some of the Demerol that sat on my counter into her food. Ease the pain a little in her last autumn.

  They all say it is dangerous to befriend a wild animal. Is it for the animal’s sake or for our own? People, people who live away from wild animals, they say we are different from the creatures that roam this world. That we are apart from them. Above them.

  My body shrunk, just as my leg in my cast shrunk.
I had no control over this anymore. My sister worried. Dorothy worried.

  Both Joe and Gregor came by for a visit one evening. Gregor was off from teaching for the summer, had just come back from a trip to somewhere far away. Vietnam? Thailand? One of those places that promised him girls the age of his students, willing to do anything for some Canadian dollars, even the promise of marriage.

  “I bought a girl for the night for fifteen dollars,” Gregor told us as we sat on my porch and stared at the river glitter in late sunshine. “She looked sixteen with makeup on in the dark, but in the light of my motel room, I could see she was younger.”

  We both looked at him.

  “I sent her home with another fifteen bucks.” Joe and I didn’t drop our gaze. “I promise you, I didn’t touch her. I couldn’t.” And so we all grow up, grow old eventually.

  Joe offered me a beer, and I took it. “I haven’t really been drinking much these last weeks,” I told them. “I’m worried if I do, I won’t ever stop. I’ll drown myself with it.” Joe offered to take it back, but I told him it’s all right. “Just one or two tonight. I’ll be fine with that.” But we drank until the case was gone, pacing each other, eight apiece. The case sat empty by dark. I wanted more, was buzzed now, and said as much.

  “I’ve got a bottle of rye at home,” Gregor said, but Joe answered for me.

  “Let’s call it at a case, eh, Will?”

  I nodded without wanting to. “If you two stay here a little longer,” I said, “I’ll show you something good.” Gregor walked to his car and returned with a twelve-pack. Joe looked pissed. I snatched a beer from it. Sunday’s pork roast gift from Lisette rotted by the bushes. It had buzzed with flies the last two days. I was worried about my sow but had the feeling she’d appear tonight. She must have been hungry. Hungry enough to ignore these other human scents mingling with my own.

  When I heard the crack of underbrush, I warned my friends to stay silent, not to make any quick movements. My bear stuck her anvil head from the brush and then approached slow and cautious to the edge of my porch light. Gregor stared with wide eyes. Joe’s eyes narrowed. “Looks like the dump bear you shot a couple months ago,” Joe said.

  “She does, doesn’t she?” I said. And I found myself sharing my secret with two more humans. We watched as she sniffed the meat and then daintily took it in her jaws. Rather than the usual, the gorging of it right there, she turned back quick and scurried into the bush, snapping branches as she tripped to safety.

  “She’s been coming around all summer, so I’ve been feeding her good,” I said.

  “Nothing good can come from that,” Joe said.

  “She’s an old kookum needing a good meal,” I said. He just shook his head. “Keep it to yourselves, boys. I don’t want MNR finding out about her or she’s dead.”

  “Something has changed in our old friend,” Gregor said. “The bear slayer has softened around the heart.”

  I took another beer. We all did. Raced each other now before they were gone.

  My dreams were no longer of my father’s rifle speaking to me. They were of my bear and me sitting on my porch together, me on my chair, my bear in a larger, stronger chair beside me. We had become best friends and shared everything with one another. She told me of her life, her adventures in the bush, raising a family, fighting off wolves and humans, of sleeping long and late through winter, dreams of the meals she would eat in spring filling her head. I told her of my life, my loss, and the small gains I hoped to one day make. My bear promised me she would watch over you, my nieces, keep you safe on the journey. I wanted to ask her how she would do this now that her life was coming close to its end but always woke up before an answer could be spoken. I only told my friends that night, “I will never refuse a meal to a friend.”

  Not long after, I remember your mother coming to visit. She didn’t even bother cracking the latest book and trying to read to me. I noticed she hadn’t brought a plate covered in tinfoil.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Sit down,” I said, pointing to the kitchen table. The mosquitoes outside were at their worst at this time of the evening.

  “I need to tell you something,” Lisette said, averting her eyes. “About what I’ve been doing.” I looked at her as I fell into a chair across from her, my left knee screaming with the jerk somewhere below the plaster.

  I gave her my look, eyebrows raised. Go on. She hesitated, looking down at her hands, her fingers wrestling each other. Spit it out. She knew this much, had come here to tell me what she needed to.

  “I’ve been an informant for the OPP for the last number of months. Since Suzanne last called. Since she stopped calling.”

  I wanted to stand up and walk outside, but couldn’t. “What is an informant?” I knew, but I needed the time to think about this. The complications. I looked up at Lisette. Wanted her to see I was not surprised or angry.

  “I knew …” Your mother continued to look at her hands in her lap. “I’ve known certain things about Suzanne, mostly about Gus, for a long time. She left her diary. Letters. She left them on purpose.”

  “I wish you’d talked to me first,” I said evenly as possible, wanting to find out what I could now and not shut down this conversation with angry words. Marius ran through my head. He followed me from Joe’s with his two buddies and beat me in the bush. He threw a Molotov cocktail through my window. He handed some town punks money or drugs to smash my leg with a bat. He had his reasons. He’d taken his stand. He thought I was the informant.

  “How much have you told them? What do they know?”

  “I never gave them any of Suzanne’s diary. I went to them when she hadn’t contacted me in over a month. I wanted to see if they could help. I didn’t see all this coming.”

  The possibilities raced through my head. Marius’s own rat at the station. The cops themselves involved in Marius’s business. Lisette was in danger. I was. All of us were. It might have been as simple as the cops were the bumbling fools they appeared to be. Maybe not. “I wish you had told me sooner, Sister,” was all I could say. She didn’t need to be upset now. “At least now I know why he’s done what he’s done to me.”

  We sat silent for a long while. Lisette wanted to say something more, but I could see she wasn’t finding the words.

  “You’ll have to tell me all of it later,” I said to break the silence. “Tomorrow, maybe. I need to know all of it. We both need to talk so we can figure a way out of this.” One last thing I said before Lisette got up to go. “Are you still talking to them?”

  “Not in a while,” she said. I watched as Lisette walked to her car and climbed in. I wanted to follow her home to protect her but realized she wasn’t the one Marius was after, or she’d be in a hospital or dead already. I waved to her as she pulled away.

  When the next afternoon had come to its laziest part and I sat on my porch, leg itching madly under the cast, throbbing so that I couldn’t stand it any longer, I called Joe. He didn’t answer. I called Gregor, thinking Joe might be with him, but no answer there, either. I made the decision to call your mother. No putting this off. I was good at that, putting things off. Especially the things that are most important.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “We need to talk.”

  Lisette came over. No food, no book, looking tired from worry. “Your house needs a good cleaning,” she said, sniffing the air. “That or you. Or both.” She always started with the obvious, your mother, the small talk.

  “I haven’t heard from Annie now in a long while, either,” she finally said. “Did I make some mistake in raising my girls? Some mistake that causes them to disappear?”

  “Annie’s a strong one,” I said. “She is having a great time down in that big city. But she’ll be back soon. She’ll get sick of that place soon.” I didn’t say anything about you, Suzanne. When I tried to conjure you, your face was hazy, slowly fading like a photograph too long in the sun.

 
We stared out at the river glistening in bright light. I was patient. Waited for your mother to speak first. When she could no longer avoid it, my sister began. The words poured out. Poured out so that I could only sit back in my chair and watch the river pass, the sun sink.

  She told me how she first approached the OPP when you disappeared, Suzanne, truly disappeared, and your mother hadn’t heard from you in close to two months. The police acted concerned, telling her they’d make the necessary calls to their superiors, who would contact police in Toronto. They helped her to file a formal missing persons. But then the cops began calling your mother with questions. Was Suzanne last seen with Gus Netmaker? Had Lisette ever spoken to Gus? What was Suzanne’s business in Toronto with a Netmaker? Your mother brought fashion magazines to the police station with you in them, and those men stared at your body in a way that made your mum uncomfortable. When she pressed them to tell her what they knew, they told her that first she had to tell them what she knew if they were to help. They convinced your mother that if they were to be cooperative, she had to be cooperative first. Your mother, she is an innocent. I watched the river pass and listened to how they worried and bullied her.

  She told me how the rookie cops who come here only to cut their teeth by arresting drunken Indians on Saturday night streets, who bully gas-huffing kids, who get bored quick in our town, decided they were on to something good, something that would get them noticed by their superiors and get them more choice jobs in places far south of here, how they pushed my sister into believing that if my niece was to be rescued, my sister would have to tell them everything she knew about the Netmaker family, about Marius and his hold on this town. And your mother told them everything she knew, everything we all knew, that Marius is a bad man who has introduced a curse into our community, a religion that goes against the sweat lodge and the shaking tent, that promises a freedom that can’t be reached.