I wish Eva wasn’t working night shifts. She’d be a good buffer right now. A few of the tougher guys eyeball Gordon as we push to the bar, which makes me nervous. A lot of people milling about there are Netmaker allies, and I’m immediately thinking this is a bad idea. I order two beers and, as we look for an open table, I promise myself if anything looks like it might get ugly, we get out of here.
People are liquored up enough that they’re out on the dance floor. It’s early for so many to be shaking it. Most dances, that doesn’t happen till midnight. I guess people are February stir-crazy. We find a table near the back, out of the flashing strobe lights and removed from the DJ booth. We could actually talk if Gordon knew how to. I stare up to the DJ booth, and I drink half my beer before I realize I’m staring. People ignore us now, so I send Gordon for another round. He takes the empties. All he has to do is hold them up.
I sit alone and watch the men in winter boots and the women wearing jeans far too tight for them. These people, most of whom I recognize, they push and touch and come together and move apart. All of them want something but don’t seem to know exactly what it is. I think it’s a desperation they try to drown with beers and plastic cups of liquor.
I know the feeling. I tried ecstasy in Montreal. I don’t remember anymore how I got to the club or how I got home. That night, and so many that followed, they tend to be fuzzy around the edges, bright and sharp, then blurring and gone, like headlights on the highway. Was it Soleil who invited me? No, I hadn’t met her yet. It was Violet. Definitely Violet. She introduced me to DJ Butterfoot that night. I didn’t know what the little pill was she handed me. All she told me is that Suzanne loved it. Violet knew Suzanne, and Violet promised to help me track her down. I watched the lights, the people, all so hip and beautiful, dancing in packs. The music Butterfoot played, trance, pulsed in flashes on the edge of my periphery. All we needed that night was bottled water. If I held one, I knew the world was all right, that I was going to be okay.
Everyone that night, including me, was beautiful, crested on the same waves, all of us going higher as each song peaked, then slipping down on the wave when the song ended, only to be picked up higher again with a new beat. I swore I could see colours I hadn’t before, a crispness of vision that made me say wow.
Men came up to me just to say hi, to talk to me, some of them touching my hair, commenting on its blackness, its length, how it shone midnight blue. I had no idea who was tripping and who was just naturally weird. That night, one of the first nights I knew Violet and could still believe her, she and I played a game where we collected as many men’s phone numbers as we could. I thought it was hilarious, and, at points, couldn’t stop giggling. I didn’t even have a phone.
Gordon and I finish our second beer, and I’m bored out of my mind. Why the hell did we come here again, Eva? Thanks for the suggestion. “What do you say we get going,” I say.
Gordon raises his finger for one more. I’ve seen him drink before where he won’t stop.
“I’m tired,” I say. “The cabin will be freezing if we let the fire die out.”
Gordon places his hands together as if praying, implores me with his eyes.
“One more, and that’s it.”
Three drinks later, I’m being asked to dance and actually accept the offers. Different guys from my past, from Suzanne’s past, they’ve gotten to the point where their inhibitions have drowned in the rye. “You look great, Annie,” one says. Another asks if I’ve heard from Suzanne. I can feel the heat of their women’s eyes try to burn my back.
I’m heading back to the table and Gordon isn’t there. I look around, panicked, and see him heading into the bathroom. Three guys leaning against the bar look at each other and then follow him in. Damn it. I recognize one of them, a guy from a bootlegging family up the coast. I pick up a beer bottle and follow, pushing through people in my rush.
I barge right in, the fluorescent lights hurting my eyes. Gordon is standing at a urinal, but he’s not pissing. He looks tense. Gordon is no dummy. He’s lived on the streets long enough.
“Hey!” I shout at the three guys who stand behind him in a half-circle. They look at me like they’ve been caught, but only for a second.
“What? Did you grow a cock while you were down south?” the bootlegger asks. The other two laugh.
“You’ll lose a cock if you don’t get the hell out of here,” I say. The words surprise me as much as they do the three guys.
“A man can’t even use the pisser?” one asks. While I’ve gotten their attention, Gordon has zipped up and faces them now. He’s thin but is built well. He removes his jacket quick, and I glance at his scarred, muscled arms. Faded blue tattoos. More cigarette burns than I can count. That’s my man.
A couple of men laughing at something march in. They’re caught by surprise at this scene, but their sudden appearance is cold water on the three would-be attackers.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the bootlegger spits as they push past me.
Today at the hospital I sit in my uncle’s room and realize I don’t have much of anything to say to him. It’s one of those days, I guess. I’m depressed but don’t see the point of sharing this with him. What if he really can hear me, and this causes him to be sad? “Uncle,” I say, leaning closer, “all I want to tell you today is that you would have been proud of me, that Grandpa would have been proud of me if you’d seen me at the dance the other night. I protected my own. I stood up for a loved one.” Loved one? Where did that come from?
This time when I stand up, I don’t head to the window. I’ll come back soon, Uncle. I promise. Maybe it’s because Eva is working nights and isn’t around to remind me that talking to a man in a coma is therapeutic that I feel stupid for doing it today. I dress for the cold and head outside.
I still haven’t changed the belt on my snowmobile. I can feel it slipping once in a while, hear the motor revving high before the belt catches again. I carry a spare belt, a spare gas can and sparkplugs, just like Uncle Will taught me to so many years ago.
The sun glaring on the snow begins to give me a headache. I narrow my eyes as much as I can so that the sun on snow flashes white with each bump of my snowmobile. I keep the throttle steady and just follow the wide river, my eyes squeezed near shut now against the bright light and wind. I begin to enjoy this driving almost blind. A thrill in this, the light playing tricks with me. The drone of my machine, the bouncing of skis on the harder-packed parts of the trail, this jiggles loose images, images I must have conjured with some past fit. Each bump on the trail creates another flash of light. Bright camera flashes.
I watch from some corner of my brain as a man stands above Suzanne, his legs straddling her. She is nearly naked below him, has her arms crossed over her breasts. Her head is slightly cocked, as if she’s considering something funny, the slightest hint of a smile on her face. Flashes of light on Suzanne. Good, the man says. Hold there. Good. Perfect. The man smiles and helps Suzanne up. She isn’t in the least bit shy of being naked in front of him. Beautiful, he says. She is.
Something I never told my mum, that I’ve not told anyone, is that my seizures started coming back not long after Suzanne and Gus headed south. I thought they’d become a thing of the past.
When I was younger, my attacks mortified me. They created such pain when they hit and left me weak and useless for hours after. They made me feel ashamed. Often, I can tell when one’s coming; it’s like a cloud passing over the sun. The light dims a tiny bit and my scalp begins to tingle. That’s when I know to find a quiet place to lie down and clench a towel or a T-shirt, whatever I can find, between my teeth and brace myself for the first shooting pains through my skull.
Something I rarely tell anyone is that I’m left with fractured images of people I recognize, and sometimes don’t, floating around in my head, like memories of experiences I’ve really had. It’s like seeing those memories in a mirror that has been smashed on the floor. It’s up to me to bend down and pick them up and try to r
eassemble them into a reflection that makes sense.
I don’t know for sure what happened to Suzanne and Gus. They sure weren’t going to call me every Sunday and give me an update. Suzanne and I don’t hate one another, but we both don’t like to back down, either. Like any younger sister, she’s annoying. She doesn’t think enough of others as she moves through the world.
The cabin’s empty when I get home, the fire burned down and telling me Gordon’s been gone for a while. I have to force myself to keep calm and tell myself he’s just fine. The faces of the guys who were about to jump him a couple nights ago crawl into my head. What are the chances they asked around and found out from someone I’m living out here? What about one of Marius’s friends in town knowing where I’m living? Marius has been gone less than a month, and some of his friends might now be looking for revenge. I’ve only told Mum and Eva I’m out here, but in this place, when one person knows something, within a few days everyone does. I head back outside and look for other snowmobile tracks but don’t find any. I try to follow Gordon’s big boot prints, but it’s been too cold to snow for a week and it’s near impossible to figure out which are the most recent.
I stuff the stove with wood and boil water for tea. He’s fine. He’s probably just taking a walk. It’s got to be hard for him being here, lonely and boring. I’ve asked him to come with me to the hospital, but he writes that this is something I need to do alone. He wouldn’t have travelled so far that he couldn’t hear my snowmobile arriving, would he? It will be dark in a couple of hours. If he isn’t back in the next half-hour, I’ll go out and look for him.
I’ve drunk my tea and am pulling on my boots when I hear him walking up outside, feet crunching in the snow. He stamps inside, a big smile on his face. He holds one of my conibear traps in his mittened hand, a small marten dangling stiff and frozen from it.
“You didn’t remember how to open the trap, did you?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I take it from him, the metal so cold it burns my hand, and place it on the ground, then step on it so it opens and the marten comes loose. “You had me worried, Gordon,” I say. What am I going to do with you? “We’ll let it thaw and then I’ll show you how to skin it.” He smiles and I reach my hand out to him, touch his cheek.
Eva opens the side door, and I slip in, shivering. “You’re going to get me in trouble, you,” she says as I struggle out of my snow gear. “The hospital isn’t supposed to take visitors at night. You know it.”
“I’ll be quiet,” I say. “I promise.” We take the elevator up to the top floor. Eva’s talked with the other night nurses, and they’re okay with me coming in. As long as anyone on administration doesn’t find out, I’ll be fine. My winning argument with Eva is that she’s the one who told me talking to my uncle can be beneficial, and my mum has cornered the day market. Why not double up shifts and see what happens?
The low glow of the machines by him casts a strange light on his face. I turn on the bedside lamp and sit for a while.
“Two Cree girls in the city for the first time,” I say to Uncle Will. “Now that’s a story I bet you’d like to hear.” I can grab a few hours’ sleep early mornings and get to spend more time with Gordon, too. Who needs a full night’s sleep? I can sleep when I’m dead.
I’m not a savage. I’d taken the Polar Bear Express down to Cochrane before, 186 miles of bumpy tracks through the muskeg, Indians sleeping as their children run wobbly-legged along the aisles. Some say the Polar Bear is a dead-end train whose sole job is a government money pit, their pittance to the Cree. It’s our train that makes the run between the last town on the northern highway up to Moosonee, the asshole of the Arctic, as a way to keep the Cree from getting hostile. I don’t know, but the handful of times I’ve been on it, I like it. It’s the one thin connection between us and them. Me and the world out there.
I’ve even been further south once, to North Bay. Mum rented a car when Suzanne and I were young, a nightmare drive with Mum white-knuckling the steering wheel, embarrassing me and Suzanne for two hundred miles by going half the highway speed, transports barrelling by. She tried to make it up to us by taking us shopping and allowing us to be swallowed up by the biggest town in Northern Ontario. But this time, Eva was taking me far further south than I’d ever been. To a true city.
It’s just like on TV, Uncle, massive buildings and police sirens screaming and people everywhere. All the people. That’s what freaked me out. I wondered where they all could have possibly come from. The first time being drowned in a sea of humans on a busy downtown street, it made me want to take the quickest bus north. You see people on TV walking downtown like there’s some order to it, like they even know where they’re going. But the reality? People bump and shove and smell like perfume or body odour, and so many look like they don’t want to be there. The weirdest thing to me is how most of them never look you in the eye.
Eva’s a good woman. But she can be kind of cheap. She got us a motel for the week near a place called Cabbagetown. Right away you have to wonder what the name’s all about. It’s a close enough walk to Yonge Street and all the craziness there, the bars and strip clubs and dirty-looking men.
Our motel smells of piss. I quickly learn that the difference between a motel and a hotel is that a motel is where all the mangy people stay.
We try to have fun the first couple of days, walking as far as Eva’s shin splints will take her. We even go to a bar one night, and we order martinis. The idea of it, the simple speaking it out loud, thrills me like I’m fifteen again and stealing a couple of bottles of beer. But the taste makes me want to gag. The bar is a fancy one, and the waitresses are pretty and know it. I think of Suzanne. I wonder if she worked in a place like this before she was discovered. I even allow myself to believe I might run into her down here. We’ll pass each other on the street, and we’ll hug and maybe cry a few tears.
These first few days, Eva and I wander in cold spring rain and grey afternoons, past dreary buildings and budding trees with blackened bark. Even the squirrels are black, and I see my first city Anishnabes, the city Indians. They congregate by Queen and Bathurst, sitting or pacing slowly, begging change with blackened fingers. Once, Eva and I pass a group of them huddling under the awning of an old bank, and one surprises me by calling out to us in Cree. He’s an old man, a grandfather, proposing marriage to me, or Eva, or both. We laugh and keep going.
You get used to anything quick, and I find myself getting used to this city. Eva and I find our routine, each day going a little further out from the places we’ve already walked. I drag Eva from the motel each morning and force her to explore. I need the exercise, feel like I’m getting fat sitting around and eating. According to the fashion magazines we’ve been reading, sitting on our beds waiting for the weather to turn just enough to go out again, my height versus body structure and weight suggests I’m not model material. Screw them. I’m a healthy, good-looking woman. I can drag a moose haunch out of the bush if need be.
On our fourth day, we come up on the corner of Bathurst and Queen once more, and there is that group of Indians sitting again, the old man with a leather face, two women whose age is almost impossible to tell, and a tall, thin one with long hair who watches everything, alert as a warrior. He’d be good looking if he took care of himself.
“You Anishnabe women?” old leather-face calls out to us as we walk by. I nod and smile, know to respect my elders. He calls for us to sit with him and talk.
“Ewww! Ever!” Eva says back to him, her voice going high at the end. So Moosonee.
I turn to Old Man, forcing Eva to stop, too. She won’t go anywhere without me. Too scared.
“I’d sit with you but the step is wet.” I point to it, see that the bank it leads up to looks permanently closed. Old Man stands all wobbly, and the two women stare at me territorially. Skinny guy looks away but glances quick at me every few seconds.
“Granddaughter, you’re a good-looking one, you,” Old Man says. “You
could be a model.” The two women cluck noises that sound like disapproval.
“If you want some change, Grandfather,” I say, “compliments will get you everywhere.”
He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even seem to know I said anything.
“Annie, let’s go,” Eva whines. I lift my finger up to her to hold on a sec. I reach for my wallet, take out a ten-dollar bill, and hand it to him. He takes it quick as if it’s a loan owed him. Maybe it is.
“Spend it wise,” I say. “Booze is the white man’s poison, not ours.”
As I begin to walk away he calls out, “A girl, she looked a lot like you, but skinnier.” I stop quick. “Skinny as Painted Tongue there.” He points at the quiet, tall one. “She used to be generous like you. More generous, even.”
“What was her name?”
“Me, I don’t know,” Old Man says. The two women have turned their attention somewhere else.
“Suzanne?” I ask.
Old Man shrugs. But the one called Painted Tongue pulls his hands out of his pockets and wiggles them like a little boy who needs to pee.
“Annie, come on, let’s go,” Eva says quietly so that they won’t hear her. “Ever losers, them.” The women glance up. They tsk-tsk and laugh to one another.
Eva pulls at me then. I want to stay and ask them questions but realize that this is ridiculous. They just want to get more money from us. A free lunch.