But tonight there’s no fooling around. Roddy paces the floor like an anxious bear, his black braided ponytail flopping almost to his bum.
Our Shawanagan Special tonight is the biggest ever. If you want to play, you have to buy special strips at $5 a pop, but the winner walks with a guaranteed $4,000. We have to sell eight hundred cards just to break even. Roddy decides to leave the cashier box open a couple of extra minutes despite cries of “Let’s play,” and “Get on.” From where I sit, with all the scurrying about and money changing hands, we’ll break even. But you’re never positive until the accounting’s done at the end of the night.
Roddy comes up to me before I start play again. “Remind the crowd about the jackpot game tonight, Mary,” he says. As if they need to be reminded. I clear my throat and switch on the mike.
“Let me just tell you about tonight’s jackpot game.” Everyone goes real quiet and stares up at me. “The game is included with your admission price. You can buy extra cards at $25 a pop. Jackpot game is fill your card in forty calls or less and win $50,000. In forty-one calls, $40,000. In forty-two calls, $25,000. In forty-three calls, $15,000. In forty-four calls or more, $5,000.” I see the glow in people’s eyes. It’s an addiction.
“The point isn’t to win, it’s to win big!” Roddy tells the Palace workers at our meetings. “You either lead, or you follow, or you get out of the way.” It’s a good scare tactic but doesn’t leave much room to argue. I sometimes take a walk and look around the rez and wonder.
I was out walking with Little Ollie and Rachel when I heard about Ollie. Ernest, the band’s police chief, roared up in a dust cloud. When he got out of his Bronco, he looked sad and red-eyed.
“I got bad news, Mary,” he said. “Come here away from the little ones for a minute.” I remember thanking him for telling me, and walking the kids down the dirt road to the pond Ollie always took them to.
“Daddy can’t take you fishing here no more,” I said. “Or to school or out in the bush.” Their deer eyes looked up at me. Little Ollie figured it out fast and ran away on his skinny legs, his sneakers slapping up puffs of dust on the road. Rachel cried and wanted her brother to come back.
Little Ollie isn’t so little anymore. He’s eleven now and he blames Roddy but can’t reason it out exactly why. I tell my boy that it was his father’s time to go to Gitchi-Manitou, that he’s up in the sky as a twinkling star now, looking down at us. The few rumours are just rumours. But my boy fights it. He’s not named after his dad for nothing, I figure.
I start in the thirteenth game with one of my favourites, Telephone Pole, where you’ve got to fill in the right numbers to make the design on your card look like one. The next game, Picnic Table, goes along the same lines. “Buy extra jackpot cards soon,” I remind everyone. “Jackpot is five games away.” I glance at my watch. Tonight’s going to be a late one for sure. The kids are long asleep.
My mother watches the kids on bingo nights. She tries to refuse my money, but I pay for her time anyways.
“We take care of our own,” she says to me. “We’ve always taken care of our own. We’re Ojibwe.”
After Ollie died and I started working, Mom and me started fighting. One night I got out of work real late, and she got angry when I went to pick up the kids. “Ollie wouldn’t want you working there,” she said. That got me mad. “He thought bingo wasn’t Indian. It’s a white man’s game.”
I knew that already. It got me madder. “Indian?” I said. “Indian? We’re Ojibwe and you don’t even know our language.” I tried to pass her to get the kids, but she stopped me and wrestled me to the ground by my hair. I began to cry and shouted, “Where were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?” She had me pinned beneath her, her cheeks shaking and her chest against mine.
“Where were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?” she asked. Our eyes got big at the same time. And then we started laughing at what I’d said until my sides were about to burst. We just lay beside one another on the floor and laughed. It felt good. We’ve been tight ever since.
I’ve asked Mom to come out and play bingo. “I’ll find another sitter,” I tell her. But she doesn’t like the thought of a room packed with quiet, serious people and smoke.
“I could go to a sweat lodge if I want to see that,” she always tells me. But I can see the question in her eyes, whether it doesn’t bother me to be working for something Ollie hated.
I don’t think it bothers me.
Really, I don’t.
Roddy puts the word out that there are professional gamblers up from Toronto tonight.
“You just call those balls, Mary,” he says. “You call ’em during the last game and pray hard. I don’t want to see you call out the big one tonight.”
As if I got a say. If somebody wins, Roddy loses the council money, not his backers’. That’s the truth. If someone wins the big one and I get blamed, I’ll just laugh and tell him, “Ollie came to me in a dream and said, ‘Fuck you.’” I’ll just walk.
“Next game is Crazy H,” I say. My voice is muffled by chatter and smoke. We play mostly tried-and-true bingo strategies here. Roddy’s travelled as far as Montreal and Vancouver to keep up on the business. He wants a slick operation, only the best.
The Bow Tie and Cloverleaf games slow things down some, but the Inside Square and Outside Square games go faster than I’ve ever seen. I’ve barely called twenty-five balls and both are won. There’s so many cards out there tonight, house odds are way down.
When I call intermission before the big one, a line forms at the cashier box. The jackpot is actually three games in one. The best we can hope to fork out is $7,000. A grand for the first person to get One Line Anywhere, another grand for Four Corners and, if we’re real lucky, only $5,000 for the jackpot.
Most are already in their chairs when I call them to play. Every other person has a smoke lit. I start the big one, and I call fair and slow, leaving each ball on the monitor for seven seconds before calling the next.
The One Line Anywhere goes to a young woman in just eight balls. She calls, “Bingo!” then squeaks like a chipmunk and begins giggling. Albert calls her numbers back to me. I wait a few seconds for effect before saying, “That’s a good bingo.”
The Judge calls, “Bingo,” calmly after clearing his throat. He got Four Corners in twelve balls. Roddy’s pulling his hair out over in the corner. I’ve never seen people win so early. After Albert calls the Judge’s numbers and I verify, an old Indian lady I don’t recognize calls “Bingo” as well. The Judge frowns. Albert calls her numbers back. She made a mistake. The Judge smiles again.
Twenty-eight calls till we clear the first one. Roddy oversold tonight. There’s way too many cards out there. I call tons of B’s and N’s and O’s. When an I or G comes up, people tense and search their cards hard. I call the thirty-second ball when I notice a woman eyeing the far monitor carefully. I call a G. She doesn’t budge. She’s only got one game sheet in front of her; obviously she’s an amateur. But she’s lucky tonight. It looks like all she needs is one or two I’s to win, best I can see. That means there’s got to be dozens of players on the edge of taking it. Ball number thirty-eight is an I. I call and close my eyes. Nothing. Another B on the next call. People moan loud. I reach in the popper for the fortieth ball. It doesn’t feel right. I turn it over to reveal I-28. I can feel Roddy’s eyes on me. A couple of people squeal loud but then a wave of sad shouts rises up. I see Roddy smiling.
The next two balls are an N and a G. Roddy’s smiling bigger. The pot’s down to $15,000 when I pull another G. People must be thinking the popper’s rigged, so few I’s have come up. Just as I’m about to pull the ball for $10,000, a shaky voice calls out, “Bingo,” near the front door. She’s a down-to-the-wire girl. She just won herself $15,000. Everybody turns and voices rise in grunts and swear words and anger. Albert runs to the unofficial winner.
I can see it’s a young woman. She’s thin and pretty. I like her long hair. Roddy walks ove
r to help verify the numbers. I call out, “That’s a good bingo.” People clap and some cheer. The young woman doesn’t even smile. But I smile when Roddy pulls out the cheque book. It’s nice to see a winner. I get up and stretch and head down to congratulate her.
You’ve never seen a place empty faster than a bingo hall after the calling’s done. There are a few of the woman’s friends around, smoking and talking to one another. Roddy holds her arm. He’s smiling but he’s not happy.
“Congratulations!” I say.
She seems to know I mean it. “Thanks, ma’am.”
“What you going to do with all that money?” I ask her.
“Fix my husband’s Ski-Doo and get myself a new rifle, I figure. Put the rest away.”
She’s got almond eyes. She looks half Indian.
“Before you go making plans,” Roddy jumps in, “what about considering a donation to the council? You know we took a thumping in the wallet tonight to get interest up in a new casino. I’m not asking for all of it, miss, maybe $5,000. Think of it as an investment with guaranteed return. The new casino would consider you a very special guest. Always.”
I don’t believe Roddy’s nerve. “Roddy!” I say.
He shoots me a stare. “Follow or get out of the way,” he says.
It’s late. I’ve got to get to the kids.
As I near the door, the woman says, “Bingo’s as much as I can stand. I’m just really not much of a gambler. I ... I can’t imagine having luck like this again, and that’s the truth.”
I’m going to get out of the way, then.
I shut the Palace door behind me. There’s no moon and the wind blows along the pine tops. I hear the wind’s whisper. The stars are out bright. Finally to be in fresh air makes me laugh loud. I look up and say to the dog star, “Aneen Anishnaabe. Hello, Indian.” It’s the star I told Little Ollie is his dad.
YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT JENNY TWO BEARS DID
Summer barrelled up from the Great Lakes and rolled across Georgian Bay. Its heat killed the blackflies, and when the mosquito droves replaced them in the first warm nights, the weekenders arrived in swarms from Toronto and Oshawa and Hamilton and the northern States.
There was little Jenny could do about it. Weekenders meant business for the band along with the arrival of a handful of cute guys. Even a few old friends’ faces among the white hordes that crawled like freshly dug grubs over the Turtle Stone Reserve. The arrival of the tourists meant a busy night at the big show on Canada Day, for the other bands, anyway. Weekenders meant a packed beach of excited and drooling teenagers, escaped from the confines of the parents’ quaint summer cottages, grooving spastically. In the old days it had been Jenny’s very own loud and alive all-Indian-girl band playing on the stages of small clubs, screaming out the Native blues. Now it was slick white boys from the city up there on the Mosquito Beach stage, strumming insolently on guitars and acting like rock stars. It was time to realize that Sisters of the Black Bear were no longer in vogue.
Maybe calling the weekenders grubs was a little harsh. But just today she had seen a sickly pale and blubbered woman in
a sun hat trying to power a motorboat out of the marina, had watched in horror as she lost control and punched her bow into the hull of Jenny’s little Streamliner.
Jenny tried hard to hold in her anger when she walked down to the office to register a complaint against Blubber Woman. When Mike, the supervising tribal cop on duty, filled out the report, he mentioned that he’d heard the council had chosen Sisters of the Black Bear to headline Mosquito Beach this year.
“Are you sure they picked us?” Jenny asked.
“Oh yeah,” Mike answered. “Council said your new sound is great.”
He congratulated her on her band’s comeback. Her anger rubbed away now, Jenny skipped back to the marina, thinking how silly it was for her, a woman who’d be thirty-two this autumn, to be happy as a teenager. Her band had finally found a little of its old glory. Oh, they had lived through a real heyday in the mid-eighties, one year even being voted Best Female Band in the punk rock category by an underground Toronto newspaper, but that was then. Now the Sisters were set to headline the biggest bash of the year. Canada Day celebrations at the beach meant a crowd of hundreds, it meant vacationing club owners up from Toronto hungry for talent to be booked, and it meant revenge against all the bastards in the area who laughed at the notion of the band still slugging it out after all these years. Tina and Anne and Bertha were going to shit. This was the return of the old days. Jenny tried to ignore the thundercloud of worry gathering around her head. Exactly how she’d managed to get the big gig was her own dirty little secret.
“The council wants us to play Mosquito Beach?” Tina asked, slouching on her drum stool at practice that night. Jenny had called an emergency meeting, and the girls were a little pissed at having to show up a second time in as many weeks at their rehearsal space, the old and abandoned marine mechanics’ shop butting up against the green water of the bay.
“I really don’t think we’re ready to play something as big as Mosquito Beach,” Anne chimed in. “I haven’t picked up my bass seriously in weeks. And I know for a fact Bertha hasn’t touched her guitar in longer than that.” Bertha nodded meekly, holding her guitar in her chubby fingers as if it were a wilted flower. “Let’s call it off.”
“That’s not a possibility,” Jenny said. The Sisters sat for a few minutes, looking at one another.
“Why the hell would the council choose us to play something as big as that anyways?” Anne asked after a little while. “It doesn’t make sense. Fluff music is what’s in. We’re too hardcore for them. How’d they decide to pick us?”
Jenny wanted to tell the Sisters how she’d finagled it, but her burning face wouldn’t let her.
Thirteen years was a long time for any band to keep going, with all its original members still hammering away at their respective instruments. Sure, there’d been a few sabbaticals when it was time for Tina or Anne or Bertha to scream out another kid. More than a few; they’d had thirteen “baby breaks,” as the Sisters had taken to calling them, over the last 156 months. In good years, those three managed to have their babies within close proximity, so that the Sisters could take one extended break rather than a whole bunch of them. These sabbaticals gave Jenny a chance to concentrate on her clothesmaking, to fill back orders for mukluks and parkas and stitched blankets for the trading post. And in turn, her sewing gave her an excuse for not becoming a baby oven. “You think I’ve got time for procreation when I’ve got orders coming out my butt for more beaded moccasins?” Jenny would say to Tina or Anne or Bertha when they teased her about her indifference to the little babbling droolers.
Sometimes there was heartfelt questioning on the part of Jenny’s mother, who’d taken on the slight burden of managing the band over the years. “It might be good for you to have a baby,” Ma would say over a cup of coffee at the Schmeeler Restaurant or in her own kitchen. “A child opens your eyes to the world’s possibilities.” Ma liked to talk in feel-good statements that fell apart quickly when you began to pick at their meaning.
Sometimes the desire to have a baby whined in Jenny’s ears like a far-off outboard motor needing a good tune-up. But that was about it. Tina and Anne and Bertha, on the other hand, wore their babies on their sleeves like fat, brown little medals. Knocking out another one was for them as easy and by rote as Gretzky scoring a goal against the Toronto Maple Leafs. They treated it like some ridiculous hockey game: Tina 5 — Jenny 0; Anne 4 — Jenny 0; Bertha 4 — Jenny 0.
But one good thing came from their birthing rituals; when they returned to practice after sweating another one out, a whole flood of inspiration followed. The Sisters played like demons for the next couple of months. Jenny imagined that the four of them were psychically plugging into whoever the new mother happened to be, surfing her wave of pent-up and finally released estrogen. Some of the Sisters’ best songs had been born, so to speak, during jam sessions interrupted
by constant breastfeeding and diaper changing. It was a shame that so few people actually got to hear the music now, a shame that punk rock had become a dinosaur. The Turtle Stone Hall only had the guts to book Sisters of the Black Bear once a year — on New Year’s Day, of all days, when bingo was the last thing on people’s minds. Obviously, live music was too. The band had decided unanimously to pull a no-show this year if the hall came knocking lamely in late December. The band was Jenny’s baby, and she wasn’t going to have her child laughed at and scorned by a bunch of hung-over bingo players anymore.
Other than the annual New Year’s gigs, the Sisters hadn’t played live much in the last number of years. Last winter, after a particularly brutal blizzard that had shut down the rez and kept almost everyone indoors for three days, Tina had shown up at practice with a sheet of paper. “I worked something out,” she announced, waving the paper. “In the last ten years we’ve played approximately forty-six hours in front of a live audience, including encores. That’s about four and a half hours a year, maybe two gigs annually, on average.” Jenny and Anne and Bertha stared back at Tina, speechless. “I was shut in the house with Joe and the kids,” Tina said defensively. “I went a little stir-crazy.”
“So what you’re saying,” Anne said, “is that, other than the annual bingo gig, we manage to play only once a year.”
“Not exactly,” Tina answered. “Back in ’86 we played four shows in one year. But for the last five years or so, New Year’s Day has been about it.”
“So what are you saying?” Jenny asked. “You don’t think we should bother anymore?” Nobody answered. “Is your silence telling me you all want to quit?” she asked, raking the others with her eyes.
“Maybe not quit,” Bertha finally spoke quietly, looking tiny and round and meek. “But maybe we should try some new material or something. Punk’s been gone for a long time. I mean, there aren’t too many people around anymore who are into the two- and three-chord thing.”