Through Black Spruce

  I search the crowded floor for a face I recognize, am touched by a hand, and turn to stare into the eyes of a boy I’ve never seen before. He smiles a sweet smile of innocence and beckons for me to dance with him, moving to the music that pulses through him and directly into me. Is he beautiful or is it just that I’m beginning to understand things I’ve never been able to before? Does this boy know I am one of the girls who can go up to the DJ booth at will? I smile back and lift my finger like I’ll be right back. I have every intention of going to him, but there’s more to see all around me.

  I look up to the booth, but another DJ works the table, a black man with long dreadlocks. Should I go back to the table where Violet sits? Maybe it’s not her table with a new DJ spinning. I will be okay.

  I see an empty chair at the crowded bar. I want to run to it but tell myself to walk. The chair will still be empty if I’m meant to sit there. I force myself to walk as slowly as I can. The chair was meant to be.

  The bartender speaks to me, but I don’t understand him. Shit. He’s French. Water, “L’eau, s’il vous plaît.” He gives me a sweating bottle and smiles. I realize I don’t have my purse. Fuck! Did I leave it with Butterfoot? I know I walked in with it. Fuck! It has some money in it. Two hundred dollars? My driver’s licence. My status card. Fuck! How will I prove I’m an Indian? Then I want to laugh. The bartender smiles again at me when I mouth, “J’ai oublié mon bissac.” I forgot my purse. Where does this language come from? I know only a few words in French, from grade school.

  He smiles again. “No problem.”

  “Merci.”

  “De rien,” and he leaves to serve another customer just when I want to ask him where my purse might be, where my French comes from.

  A cigarette. Yes, that would be good. I have an old pack in my purse, but when I reach for it, the same wave of panic washes over me again. I’ve lost my purse. Some grubby man with dirty fingers goes through it right now. I want to find it. Impossible. Go through the contents in my head. Money. ID. Pictures of my mother and Uncle Will and Eva and baby Hughie. Pictures of Suzanne. But I have some more of those from magazines folded neatly in my pocket. What else? Makeup, tampons, gum. A small goose feather Old Man gave to me. That is the one irreplaceable thing.

  A hand touches my shoulder. I turn to him. He wears small round eyeglasses and keeps his hair cut very short. He’s the kind of man who you just know is all muscle and proud of it, is very well built under his loose top. I see it in his neck, in the thick, veiny hand that holds out a cigarette. I take it and hope that Gordon is nearby. Something emanates from this one, a scent below the scent of his pretty cologne that is not good. His hand comes for my face, the flick of light like a strike that temporarily blinds me. No pain, just bright behind my eyelids. I draw on my cigarette and he clinks his lighter shut. His ring finger has a large winged skull tattooed on it.

  “Familiarity,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Ever met someone you feel like you’ve known before?”

  I smile and take a drag of the cigarette. He can’t harm me. Not here. There are too many people.

  “I’m from France,” I say. The words don’t even register coming out. He raises an eyebrow.

  A woman approaches him from behind. She is the bitch from the elevator. She is not happy.

  “I am from France,” I repeat. “And you are not.” I stand and walk away, wanting to raise my arms in the air in victory. But I don’t. I know like I know when a fit is coming that I will see him again.

  I glide into the sea, the crowd, to get away from his eyes, and hers, burning into the back of me. The need to talk to somebody, somebody I trust, swells my tongue. Something, this idea of talking until all the words come out, is not what I am used to. I hold my cigarette up above the dancers and allow myself to be swallowed by flesh.

  I need Gordon right now. I need to make sure he is okay. That I am okay. He won’t be in this crowd. I wade through the dancers and my heart races. I’m so full of light that I think it might be streaming out of my ears. The thought makes me laugh, and the faces around me smile. Where would Gordon be? I turn on my Gordon radar and immediately I’m heading for the far wall near the bathrooms, where the crowd is much thinner.

  Gordon leans against a wall in the corner, bottle in hand, swaying.

  “Talk to me,” I say to Gordon. I stand in front of him, and although I’m not drunk, I begin to sway along with him. “Talk to me.”

  He won’t look at me. I am not even here. I tap his dirty running shoe with a shiny new black boot I bought the other day. Talk to me.

  He is drunk. He won’t even look at me. He reaches into his pockets and pulls the insides out, the white of them flecked with lint. He smiles at something far away and then tries to walk away. I take his arm. I want to give him the rest of my bottle of water, pick him up in my arms and carry him home. He looks so thin, so scared when he is like this. But I know he isn’t.

  I take his chin in my hand. Little soft whiskers tickle my palm. I lift his chin so that he looks in my eyes. “You’re a good person,” I say. “I know that. Not too many others do. But you are a good man.” His eyes focus on me as if he sees me for the first time. I don’t see recognition in them. It hurts.

  I reach for my purse to give him more money, but I don’t have it. I hear the powwow music again, just underneath and holding the brand-new music above it. I look up to the DJ booth and see Butterfoot there, spinning, earphones on his head. The crowd shimmers in front of me. “I’ve figured out people,” I tell Gordon, keeping my eyes on Butterfoot. This is important, so I’ve raised my voice so that he can hear me over the music. “We crawled out of the ocean millions of years ago. Humans are mostly water. This is why I live by a river.” I turn back to Gordon to make sure he can hear me, to make him come dance with me, dance with my new friends. But when I turn my head to him, he is gone.

  I sit at Violet’s table, surrounded by chatting girls, and I feel safe. I worry for Gordon, but Gordon has lived his life on the streets. He will be okay. I sit among these new people and watch fascinated as their mouths twist and smile.

  When Butterfoot has finished his set, he sits down beside me. I want to tell him about Gordon gone missing. I want to talk to him about water. “Are you finished for the night?” I ask him.

  He nods. “Let me buy you a drink, sister of Suzanne.”

  The bar remains crowded. The muscular man leans against it a few people down. I feel safe beside Butterfoot. He hands me a drink, and when our hands touch, I know that we will be lovers. That maybe we already are. I want to ask him if he knows the same thing, but he speaks first.

  “I saw you talking to Danny earlier.” I know exactly who he’s speaking about. “Scary dude. Acquaintance of your sister’s boyfriend.”

  “I don’t like him,” I say.

  “Stay away from him,” Butterfoot says. “He worms his way into your life and you can’t get rid of him.”

  I know I shouldn’t, but I look at Danny anyways. He turns his head to me. He smiles. One of his front teeth is grey. He acts like he’s going to head our way just as Butterfoot tugs my hand and leads me through the crowd. “Let’s get out of here,” he shouts over the music.

  Outside, he hails a cab.

  “We’re going to be lovers,” I say. The words don’t sound foolish at all.

  Butterfoot smiles. He’s more than pretty. “Violet dosed you, didn’t she?” I think of the aspirin and I nod.

  He smiles again.

  17

  THE SPIDER IN THE ROOM

  My bear came to me, and she was old enough and smart enough to sniff carefully, but she learned to trust me, too. Her nose twitched. An animal’s body vibrates, whether it wants to or not. I’ve seen this on the Nature Channel. Snakes, for example, find their prey through the vibrations they feel in their tongues. A springbok will feel the vibrating trot of the lion that stalks it. And bodies seem to stop when the heart stops. But the hum, the hum of the world, I thi
nk it continues after one’s body has stopped beating. The humming of a living body, pike or sturgeon, ruffed grouse or moose or human, when it passes to death, the beat of that heart continues, in a lesser way maybe, but it joins the heartbeat of the day and the night. Of our world. When I was younger I believed that the northern lights, the electricity I felt on my skin under my parka, the faint crackle of it in my ears, was Gitchi Manitou collecting the vibrations of lives spent, refuelling the world with these animals’ power.

  My bear knew my body’s vibration. She knew when I was alone or with others. She knew if I was tense or relaxed. Each day I’d make the decision I wouldn’t have a drink until my bear showed up in the evening, and I was mostly good at keeping this promise. But when my bear showed, I drank. Beer, rye. Whatever I had. And as the late-summer sun settled onto the lip of the horizon and was ready to sleep for five hours, I drank my drink and imagined as I always did my bear sitting beside me on her own chair. We’d talk.

  I wanted to tell my sow that fear had become a part of my being, of my daily world now. This was something I wasn’t used to. I used to be fearless. Truly. This was my specialty, my claim to fame as a bush pilot. Never getting unnerved, until the end of those days.

  I’ll tell it now, because I’ve never told it, and I fear time is short. My second crash was in summer. No frozen fuel lines to blame. No bitch wind, just a simple trip from Moosonee to Attawapiskat, me bringing some locals home to the rez. A young mother and her two children and a daylight flight, clear skies in Moosonee but a lightning storm racing off the bay and catching us. I saw it coming, was amazed by its speed. Lightning and thunder is actually a rare thing in these parts. But when it comes, it comes hard and dangerous. I watched the black sky approach from the east as we flew over Albany. I had the option of landing on the gravel there but thought I could beat what was coming.

  The advance winds of the storm tried to turn my plane sideways, my left wing to the ground as I raced north. I fought that wind by leaning all I had into my wheel, steering into the gusts, and when the gusts relented, my plane dropped then rose then dropped to the earth again so violently that the young mother began throwing up. Her children started their screaming. The veins on my hands popped out from my fists. That’s what I remember. Thick blue veins throbbing beneath brown skin. Black sky swamped us, and I fought to fly lower out of it, fighting downdrafts, but finding no purchase for the little plane.

  Lightning cracked too close, and I hoped I had hundreds of feet still, not sure but gripping the steering hard and working my feet hard on the rudder pedals, trying to keep true. My right hand was ready to juice the throttle so that if trees came up fast, I’d try to get over them. I was flying blind now, and the horrible realization struck me that I was only flying into the worst of it.

  This was truly the first time I saw the face of something I’d only heard about but never truly grasped or believed. I thought of my wife at home with our young sons, and I began to think I would never see them again. I saw the face of it when the lightning flashed so close to my plane that electricity made the hair on my head stand up. And that is when something strange happened. I made the conscious decision to push my wife and my sons out of my head and focus myself, my complete self, for the young woman and children in the seats behind me. I decided then and there to live, to live or to die trying, for them. I agreed to give up all in the world if only I could save the beautiful young mother and her two children huddled and sick and screaming in the back of my shitty little plane.

  Perhaps I realized I was the one who had put them into this position, my young stupidity trying to outrun a storm. God, if you are out there, please spare this woman and her children and take from me the price. Maybe it wasn’t as quick as I remember it, but it seemed that when I whispered those words, a bright hole appeared on the horizon, above me and a thousand feet or so ahead, and I steered my plane up, working the throttle till the motor shrieked and the whole plane shook, shooting that plane up, up, up to the light in the sky.

  The lightning stopped then as the black of the front dropped away beneath us and I found smooth air again. I looked below me at the thunderhead we’d escaped, midnight pitch lit up by angry cracks that flashed like Bible illustrations I’d seen in rez school.

  I reached for the mickey of rye I always kept under my seat for emergency situations, not even caring if my young passengers saw it. I cracked the seal and drank. I flew and I flew, due north, past the rage below me, past Attawapiskat, seventy miles past it until I was sure the storm was long gone and swept west to wherever it was headed. We spent two hours flying and waiting to land, a half-full tank and the vibration of my engine comfort through my hands.

  I asked the beautiful young mother if she wanted a sip of my rye, and she took it. Her youngest slept fitfully beside her, but her older boy, he gripped his mother’s arm and whined in Cree for us to go to the ground. I told him we were okay now, invited him to sit up beside me in the passenger seat with its very own steering wheel. I taught him how the plane worked. I showed him how to pull back to go up, push in to go down, explained that flying only feels unnatural at first but is the most natural thing in the world.

  He finally began smiling as we turned south toward Attawapiskat once more, the storm on the western horizon and the sun shining above it like a warm smile. I said, “You drive now,” and crawled up from my seat, leaving him with the wheel in his little hands. I squeezed into the seat beside the young mother, pretending I was on vacation, her little boy white-knuckling the steering wheel, turning his head to me in horror before cranking it back to look through the windshield again. “You’re doing good,” I said. “Just keep going straight.” I slyly watched for him to make any movement, any bad jerk of the hands, and pretended to not notice a thing except for the company of the mother.

  “Want a bit more?” I asked her, holding the bottle up. She stared at me speechless as her little boy flew the plane. I winked a knowing wink and jerked my head toward the new pilot so that she understood a second stood between me beside her and grabbing the wheel from her frightened child’s hands to right any mistake.

  That young woman was beautiful. We shared a gulp of rye beside one another, our thighs pressed together in the backseat, and then I casually climbed back up to the driver’s seat, looked over at the frightened young boy, and said, “You look tired. Good driving. You got us home.” I took the wheel again, and the boy didn’t let go of his own, peeking over to me, helping to fly that plane like a veteran.

  The still hour before dusk, when a storm has passed, came. My radio was fried by lightning. Not a breath of wind. Easy. I lined up to the runway with the boy acting like a co-pilot beside me. I explained the procedure to him, showed him how the pedals and flaps and throttle work, and we glided in, a little fast, maybe, but nothing dangerous. Too late, though, to see the standing water midway on the airfield, the glisten of it a lake where a big section of gravel had washed away, leaving a foot of muddy thunderstorm like the shadow of a witch grabbing us.

  The plane jerked soon as we hit it, and I felt my seatbelt dig into my shoulder and belly and saw from the corner of my eye the young boy’s head snap forward with the impact and heard the screams of the mother and child behind me turn into the scream of the engine driving the prop into the ground and the earth flipping to air then hard with a crash and splintering glass and metal shearing into hard, hard earth again as we slid to a stop upside down.

  I still remember the tinny taste of blood in my mouth, the sting of it in my eyes, of wanting but not being able to turn my head to the little pilot beside me or to the mother and child behind, moaning and gasping quiet. Just black then, and the fear I’d made a promise to a family I didn’t know and to my own that I could not keep.

  A white nurse from Wolfe Island who’d come up to work for the Cree of Attawapiskat saved my life. I found this out later, but remember little of it. Maybe my promise to protect the Cree mother and her two children worked in some small way. They escaped w
ith scratches and two broken bones between the three of them. I had it a bit harder, a cracked sternum, but my white nurse, Leann, she recognized the symptoms of internal bleeding below it. Leann thought I was a white man when she saw me wheeled in, but when she saw my dark hands, she knew something bad beyond a concussion was happening and had a medevac get me out of there the same night.

  I ended up conscious, in Moose Factory, a few days later, only remembering Leann’s pretty smile. I had the fear bad, though, that I’d made some deal with a manitou for which I had to pay more than I ever expected.

  One night last summer, Dorothy came by and we ate out on the porch. Mosquitoes whined in our ears and chewed at our ankles. But Dorothy didn’t complain. She’s a bush woman, grew up in the summers when us kids were given freedom from the residential school to be with our families for eight weeks. Her family was the same as mine. We’d head out to our respective summer hunt camps on our rivers to fish and to reacquaint ourselves with our parents. A few days of not talking much, then a few days of us kids laughing with one another whenever our parents spoke Cree to us, then a week or two of anger and crying and trying to figure out up from down.

  We fished and hunted grouse on those first days that made us feel the whole world lay out lazily before us. But suddenly the days of freedom were gone, summer swallowed up so that we were already being sent back to school. We kids screamed and threatened running away into the bush as the last days passed. But our parents made sure we learned what we needed if we ever had to come back to the bush again for our survival.

  “Do you ever wish,” Dorothy asked me that evening, reaching her hand to mine, “that we were back in grade school together?” I was just about to ask her inside where it felt safer, where no one could see us. But the question caught me off guard. I reached for the wine Dorothy had brought, wishing for a whisky or a beer instead. This wine was still a taste I couldn’t get used to, a buzz that made me slow-headed and sad.