I don’t like coffee anymore, but I still go to the coffee shop and drink it. When Michael left, Lucky said that the city fuck was worried the blackflies might chew his cock off if he stayed any longer.
My stomach’s getting puffy so I try not to smoke, but it’s become a habit. It won’t be long before Mom and Lucky notice. It won’t be good. I’ll have to tell them soon.
When it comes, the pain will be like that night with him, and worse. I will open my legs wide and scream and curse and howl. Then the midwife will back away, muttering prayers and crying. My baby’s grey furry head will enter this world. He will bare his white teeth and gnaw through our cord. He will look at me and smile with black lips and yellow eyes. He will run off into the bush, and he will cross the ice highway.
SHAWANAGAN BINGO QUEEN
Springtime brings the blackflies. Clouds of biting gnats that dig into your ears and nose and scalp swarm to the reserve in the first warm days to feed on us and keep us indoors for the four or five weeks that they eat and mate and die. You might not be able to see their teeth or even their little bodies crawling in your hair, but when blackflies start sucking, you know it. I remember, when I was a small girl, I was playing out back by the edge of the bush and a chainsaw scream started up in my head and sent me wailing to my mother. I put my finger in my ear and pulled it away all bloody. My mother said, “Hush, Mary,” and stuck the point of a rolled-up towel in and wiggled out three of the buggers. Then she took her bottle of rye and tipped my head sideways and poured some in. My first taste of whisky came running down my cheek, mixed with blood that I licked off the side of my face.
Sometimes I think I fell in love with my husband, Ollie, because no matter how bad the blackflies got in spring, he’d still go out and about, working on his old car or hunting in the bush. He didn’t let a thing stop him. When we first married he’d get a bottle of American bourbon that had been smuggled from over the border and take me out in his little boat late at
night to look at stars and get drunk and silly. He’d take his shirt off, even if it was early spring with a sheen of thin ice forming on the lake, and stand on the bow and say, “Look, Mary, that bright one there is the dog star. It’s my lucky star. Me and him, that dog, we talk to one another.” Then he’d howl out until his voice came bouncing back across the water, and I’d join in and yelp to his star and to the moon until we were both out of breath. We were young and crazy. When Ollie got killed, there was grumbling and rumours it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it wasn’t planned, some of the old ones said, but it wasn’t no accident, either.
Then our band council brought the Bingo Palace to Shawanagan. The one road running out of the rez got paved, and Chief Roddy bought his Cadillac. The Bingo Palace changed a few things.
There are still blackflies in spring, and old Jacob the hunter still keeps our freezers full of deer meat in winter. What’s changed now is we got a common focus on the rez, something to look forward to most weeknights. We got the wasichu driving in with their money, ready to spend it, sometimes driving all the way from Toronto. The Palace has given us a name.
Wasichu means white man. Grandmother never had the chance to teach me the Ojibwe word, so I borrowed from the Sioux. Don’t mistake me for a Plains woman, though. I’m a proud Ojibwe. The Sioux, when they came this far east, were our enemy, and we only feared and respected the Iroquois more. My grandmother spoke fluent Ojibwe, but she’s dead a long time ago. Before Ollie came along, I once learned some Indian from a South Dakota boy. He was Oglala Sioux and carried it proud like his barrel chest. Even though the words he taught me weren’t my language, they were still Indian, and better than nothing, I figure. In return, I taught him to say the only Ojibwe I knew, other than swear words. Ahnee Anishnaabe means “Hello, Indian” in my language. One of these days I’ll take a break from the Palace and learn some Ojibwe, something I can pass on to my two kids.
But what I can pass on to them now is my knowing bingo. I thought it was the stupidest game I ever heard of when word of the money started drifting in eleven years ago, with Yankee Indians in big new cars. Chief Roddy knew we were all down and out and there was no future for anyone collecting pogey and baby bonus cheques. Roddy was big enough to see that bingo might bring us some freedom.
You have to be a smooth talker to try to swing the elders in your favour, especially when you’re selling something as foreign as gambling. In the end, it came down to the council elders, the old women, to decide. Roddy brought money backers in from an upstate New York rez, Iroquois with slick black hair in ponytails and three-piece suits and eagle feathers. They carried charts with red lightning zigzags on them and slide projectors under their arms.
The Iroquois dazzled our old women with talk of money for schools and autonomy. Well, we never got a school. Some built onto their houses, and many have newer cars. But you know there’s still burnt-out war ponies with no windshields and most of the rez has rotted plywood and tarpaper roofs. The biggest difference when you look around is the Palace, on Centre Hill beside the rusting playground. The Palace is an old corrugated airplane hangar, insulated against winter and big enough to play a game of hockey inside, with room for spectators. There’s no windows to look out onto Killdeer Lake. Just tables and chairs to sit 450 people, and a high stage for me to call numbers from, and eight TV monitors spaced along the walls to show what ball’s being called.
It used to be that the inside was filled with card tables and folding chairs, so empty and drafty that it was ugly. I learned soon enough to judge how well we were doing by the changes inside. After the first two years the cheap furniture was gone, replaced by sturdy pine cut from the bush. But the real measure is the walls. Roddy commissioned local kids to draw murals and paint pictures. Big colourful stuff showing Manitou and Indian princesses, the Sun Catcher with her buckskin arms stretched up welcoming another day, the Circle of Protecting Buffalo. One boy drew his red and black impression of a Jesuit being tortured by Iroquois. Roddy thought it would upset the wasichu and made the boy alter it. Now, on the wall behind the stage, there’s a drawing of a Jesuit priest and an Indian warrior standing on a cloud shaking hands. Even though Ollie would have hated it, the Bingo Palace has become a nice-looking place over the last eight years.
Everyone is here to celebrate our eighth anniversary this weekend — cottagers up for the summer, townies, Indians. It’s even larger than the council expected, with the chance to win a $50,000 pot and tons of advertising in advance. The money we’re offering tonight is unheard of around here. A bunch of people have already come up and asked if the flyers were a misprint. “Fifty thousand dollars!” Abe from North Bay says real loud in my ear. “Goddamn if I’d ever have to work another day in my life!”
This is the first chance Roddy’s ever taken in terms of the house making it big or going bust. First the people have to come. The even bigger chance for us is whether or not somebody walks with the $50,000 pot, the final game of the night. I’ve never seen Roddy so nervous before. I must admit I’ve got my fingers crossed, toes too. If nobody walks with the jackpot, Roddy’s plans for a full casino — blackjack, craps, roulette, you name it — can go into motion.
An Iroquois rez out by Beaverton’s already got a building going up with the same plan in mind. The Ontario politicians tried to stop them, and it was wasichu courts that declared Native autonomy. Roddy’s got that silver shovel in his closet and he’s ready to dig the first hole. After a big fight, he got the council to put up $25,000 when our New York Iroquois partners offered to help finance the casino deal. The Iroquois want to see if we can draw the crowds. It’s now down to the money to bring in the bulldozers. Roddy told me he wants me to be a casino manager.
You couldn’t ask for a better day. The blackflies are gone for the season, so the clouds and little bit of rain’s made the cottagers antsy to get out and about. We open the doors at three p.m. sharp and have a buffet of casseroles and macaroni and venison. Old Blanche Lafleur from the tavern claims that, when she wa
lked from her place to the Palace, she counted five hundred head, not including the little ones yelling and darting among the grown-ups.
Saturday nights were never like this seven years ago when I first got a job working bingo after Ollie died. Word of our Palace hadn’t spread yet when Roddy hired me on at the snack counter. I worked my way up to official stage caller pretty quick, faster than I ever imagined. It’s quite a thing to sit above the crowd and pull balls from the air popper and hear the hush when you call. Tonight won’t be much different. As six o’clock comes near it looks like every chair in the house is taken and people have got their sheets of cards spread in front of them and are arranging all their doodads and charms.
You’ve never seen such a strange sight — troll dolls with bright pink or green hair shooting up from their heads, pieces of lucky clothing or real child hair and baby teeth. And daubers, lots of coloured bingo daubers. Most serious players always have a handful lined up, although it takes a lot of plugging away to run a dauber’s ink dry. The stylish ladies carry all their bingo gear in crocheted bags. A few even have authentic-looking wampum pouches, made from moose hide with beaded Indian scenes on them.
I notice that the teenagers form their own group along the far wall. They’ve got torn jeans and long hair and pretty designs on their T-shirts. They’re mostly rez kids, Johnny Sandy, Veronica Tibogonosh, and Earl Thibadeau among them. A few years ago, a lot of the more troublesome ones, the tricksters in the group, used to show up and do things like call, “Bing –” and then “Oh-oh,” a few seconds later, like they mistook winning a game. The older ones didn’t like that, I tell you, white or Indian. Don’t ever cross a player and her game. It’s like spitting on someone’s religion. The Indians never hushed up the trickster kids. It always seemed to be the old white ladies with thin lips making snake noises against their wrinkled fingers. Roddy finally chased the bad ones out. I don’t know exactly what he did or said, and I’m not sure I want to know. But there isn’t much trouble during the games anymore.
Tonight I notice a woman and her husband bring their little ones in to sit with them while they get ready to play. My floor runner, Albert, goes over, and it looks like he’s telling them that children aren’t allowed in during the games. You never saw people leave in such a huff. I’ve never seen the family in here before, and don’t expect to again any time soon.
That’s one of the disagreements my husband, Ollie, had with the band council so many years ago. Roddy tried to sell bingo as a business good for the whole community when Ollie started up his petition of names against it. Ollie knew there was no room for the rez kids in the Palace. In the final band vote, his big opposition speech ended with talking about our Rachel and Little Ollie. It made a stir with the older ones, but the Palace was like a black bear waking in spring, too hungry to stop.
Ollie didn’t live long enough to see bingo run on the rez. He died when he fell out of a tree. He was way up, near the top of a big pine, sawing dead wood threatening to come down during the next thunderstorm. A cottager had offered him fifty bucks for the job. The cottager was an old man then, but seems much older now when I occasionally run into him at the trading post or in town. He still sends me a prayer card every year.
It’s funny, you know. Even now I sometimes don’t believe Ollie’s gone. He was always falling out of trees or driving his snowmobile too late in spring and going through the thin ice or tearing the hull of his boat on a shoal at night. But he crawled back into our bed, wet and cold or scratched up, telling me another story. After all these years it still doesn’t sink in that nobody saw Ollie fall out of the tree or gasping for breath for half an hour with a branch through his stomach like the coroner told me. Ollie’s luck ran out. I think the rumours are just Ollie’s spirit flying around on the wind at night, stirring up trouble and rattling the pine branches.
There wasn’t much time for mourning with Little Ollie and Rachel at home. Little Ollie remembers a few things about his daddy but Rachel was only two when it happened. That bothers me a lot, the fact they’ll never know him.
Roddy knew I never liked the idea of living off government money, that I hated the idea as much as Ollie did. After the funeral, Roddy offered me the job on the snack counter at the Palace. The thought of Ollie looking down from his star and shaking his head, disappointed that I sold myself out to something like bingo, bothered me. It always will. But it wasn’t my fault that he left us early, and it seems to me that working is better than welfare. And I’m a hard worker. I moved up quick and ignored the grumbling from the others who worked the Palace till midnight and drank till dawn. Once I heard one of the townie kids call me Mary Goody Two-Moccasins. I bitched him out good.
The Palace chatters like a forest full of grosbeaks when I walk up and take my seat by the popper, on the stage a good four metres above the crowd. It’s a bird’s-eye view through the haze of smoke rising to the rafters. The noise stops with the croaking and fumbling of my mike, and you’d think a priest had walked in to say church or a judge to read the sentence. There are no empty seats. Even stragglers lean on walls or sit on the floor, arranging.
“Welcome to the Shawanagan Bingo Palace,” I say. “As a lot of you know, Queen or King for the night wins ten dollars every time their ball number comes up in play this evening. Please refer to the lottery ticket you received with admission.” I call out the number and wait for the winner. Old Barb from Magnetawan stands up and calls out, “I am Queen of the Shawanagan Bingo Palace!” Albert runs out and puts the red felt bandanna on her head. Old Barb looks very proud. People all around nod to her. It’s a serious business. I make a note that her ball is B-6. All Barb has to do is call out, “Pay the Queen,” whenever her number is announced in a game and Albert runs over and gives her ten bucks. It can add up.
I jump right into the Early Bird Special, with two games of straight bingo and two games of Full Card X. It gets the interest up and people loosened for the night. I call the balls even and a little slow, holding them in front of the camera attached to the monitors long enough that the older ones who can’t hear too well have enough time to squint out the numbers. I notice a lot of regulars in the audience tonight. There’s Barb smiling away in her red bandanna and the Burke’s Falls Lions Club gang with their matching shirts. I notice that even the Judge came out tonight. I gave him up for dead a while ago. He’s a retired lawyer from Toronto who moved up here alone. We call him “Judge” because he uses a dauber shaped like a gavel and pounds away all serious at his cards like he’s ordering the court to silence. The Early Bird winners walk with or split a hundred dollars a game.
One hundred dollars seemed like a fortune to me back when Ollie and I married. He was never much for government handouts, even though there were plenty of days we needed cash. Ollie was a wagon-burner, for sure. He sniffed out trouble and rolled in it faster than a hunting dog. He liked to piss people off. I met him at fifteen and could see it in his eyes. He’d hitchhiked into our rez from the Quebec interior and decided he liked the lake. So he stayed. But he could use a chainsaw and drive a logging truck, so he wasn’t much of a burden. Old Jacob took Ollie under his wing and taught him about fishing and hunting. Jacob is a legend around here. He feeds most of the rez through the harder months. One winter Ollie and him bagged seventy deer and fed a lot of mouths through to spring.
Then Ollie got a crush on me. He claimed it was a vision he had after hiking to Moosejaw Mountain, which isn’t so much a mountain as a heap of old quarry stone, and he got stuck there a couple days after his lunch bucket ran dry.
I’ll never forget the day he walked back onto the reserve, shouting that he was a man now, that he’d had his first true vision — one of a large brown animal whispering my name in his ear as he lay naked and sweating on a rock.
I laughed at Ollie from my doorstep, so he left and I didn’t see him again for two weeks. When he came back, his chest had swelled bigger. Ollie made sure to tell all my girlfriends that he had hitched the five hundred kilometre
s up to Moose Factory in pursuit of his vision, knowing it would get straight back to me. I’ll tell you now I didn’t like the idea of a moose popping up in Ollie’s head whenever he thought of me. We ended up marrying a year later.
After a game of Four Corners and a game of Make a Kite, I call intermission. Tonight Jan What’s-Her-Face comes and gabs in my ear like usual. She’s a wasichu cottager who wears “Free Leonard Peltier” or “American Indian Movement” T-shirts. Jan tells me that last night she had a vision in her dreams. The vision told her the winning combination of balls I would call in the jackpot game, and she looks forward to seeing if her vision was worthy.
“I always get such a feeling of freedom when I drive onto your reservation,” she says, and takes my arm in her hands. “Just imagine winning $50,000. That would be freedom too.”
She’s only a summer cottager. Her place up here isn’t even winterized. I wonder what she’d think about freedom, stuck in the house when it’s thirty below and the walkie-talkie tells you the road won’t be cleared for days.
Between the two intermissions we play Block of Nine, Anywhere, Half Diamond and Full Diamond games. They’re simple enough, but I see people’s focus is on the cards. There’s not much chit-chat while play’s in progress. The winnings are too big. Albert runs and hands out $2,000 before I call intermission again.
Bingo calling’s like any other job in that it can get boring after a while. I learned to pass my time on the stage every night watching faces and goofing around, calling numbers too fast and laughing inside at all the eyes looking up at me like panicked raccoons in car headlights. Or I’ll call real slow for a long while, listening for just the right moment when people are chatting and not paying attention. That’s when I call a few balls super-fast and listen for the angry wail of “Call again,” or “Bad bingo.” Ollie would have laughed at that.