Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

  It wasn’t until his tongue turned white that anyone figured out why he was sick. He got better and received his nickname.

  Although the thrush had nothing to do with it, Painted Tongue remembered developing a lisp when he first learned to talk. The children teased him so much that he began talking less and less. By the time he left Cedar Point at eighteen, he didn’t talk at all. His mother said he’d forgotten how. She was the only one who still called him by his birth name. Now, eight years later he still couldn’t talk, and everyone who knew of him assumed he was dumb. Painted Tongue liked it that way.

  As he neared the end of his slow walk, Painted Tongue began to grow angry that he had no booze and no money, and that whatever this goddamn building was would not show itself to him. I will blow you up, motherfucker stadium, with a thousand kilos of dynamite, he hummed. I will count coup on you, ugly concrete piece of shit. Why would anyone construct a building with a hotel and restaurants and stores and a baseball field in it? If a man desired, he could go inside and never have to come out again. It was crazy. This was a crazy fucking world.

  At least the stadium was the same size. Painted Tongue walked up slowly to where he’d started his walk, staring down an ugly woman in tight shorts until she backed away from his place along the fence, the one that offered the best view of the stadium. Back off ugly woman from this warrior on pills, he hummed. I have no booze and I am not afraid to kick a woman’s ass in such a state. At least the pills gave him an appetite. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. A hot dog would be good about now. Cree Agnes from Penetanguishene would give him a hot dog. She was a good woman. And she knew Kyle. Kyle was a friend, and Kyle would have some money that he rightfully owed. But Painted Tongue needed to think of polite ways to ask him for it. Walking up Sherbourne, he thought of polite ways to ask for what was owed him. A hot dog would taste good about now, he hummed to himself.

  It had been many weeks since he’d seen Kyle. Kyle had given up looking for Painted Tongue to take him out for a meal or coffee or drink a long time ago. Kyle had walked far from working construction with Painted Tongue, the first job the two had found years before when they’d driven together in the old Dodge war pony from Cedar Point to Toronto. Work was easy to find back then. Painted Tongue was as good as any goddamn man with a hammer and a level. He was never afraid to do roofing or construction way up high on a building, either. Balance and bravery were in his blood.

  But Kyle had hated construction work from the beginning. It callused his fingers and left his hands too sore at night to hold a paintbrush. Most lunch breaks he’d go to whatever tavern was closest to drink beer and talk to Painted Tongue. Painted Tongue remembered those days with good feelings. Those afternoons when he first started drinking were warmer with a belly full of beer, his eyes focused only on the nails to be pounded or joists to be cut and fit or the shingles to be pulled and replaced. He and Kyle had been thrown off many jobs for being drunk, but there had always been more jobs waiting.

  Then Kyle got a fancy job in a gallery selling others’ art and, after a while, his own. Now he was Big Chief in the city, and he’d given up the booze. Painted Tongue was left to find his own jobs, and the jobs got harder to find. Not many foremen wanted to hire a man who didn’t talk. Kyle moved in with a pretty gallery woman, and Painted Tongue, after some decision-making, left walls and a roof on the first warm spring day two years ago to live more simply. He enjoyed living like the grandfathers, his days spent searching out food and drink, protecting himself from enemies and sitting quietly, listening to his few friends talk to him on park benches, or lying in the grass still left between the concrete buildings. He waited in winter until the heating grates of apartment buildings couldn’t keep him warm anymore to search out a bed in the hostels or, if he was lucky, a reinforced cardboard box and blankets in a quiet thicket of pine in High Park. A warrior walked the earth on strong legs or else he perished. Kyle knew that too. Although he’d taken a different path, Painted Tongue was sure Kyle respected him highly for his abilities as a warrior on the streets. Kyle knew what others couldn’t see. Painted Tongue had found the circle to walk, and along the route of that circle he found everything he needed to live.

  When Painted Tongue arrived at the Native Centre, Agnes was busy with customers, so he wandered the gallery and admired the paintings and wood carvings and jewellery. He stopped suddenly at a large painting of a turtle, each section of its curved shell coloured green or red or black. Its nose was hooked. Small squiggled people and pine trees grew from its back. The artist had titled the painting “Earth Mother Turtle.” Painted Tongue recognized Kyle’s signature, curved and sharp like a knife on the bottom right-hand side. Agnes stayed busy with the customers for a long time, so Painted Tongue went outside to hunt for food.

  Four nights later, Painted Tongue sat by a small grove of trees and a pond in High Park. He stared up at the stars and threequarter, late-spring moon that shone through the city’s lights. Ducks by the pond honked out warnings whenever a raccoon or cat, or some bigger, shadowed animal that he guessed was a dog or fox, prowled close to the small flocks huddled by the water’s edge with their beaks buried in their wing feathers. As soon as the ducks settled down and grew quiet, the same or some other predator would make a leap from nearby bushes and send the flocks quacking and hissing, beating wings to the safety of the middle of the pond. It made Painted Tongue so nervous that he wrapped his arms around his chest and moaned out loud.

  He heard the sudden, angry shouts of a small group of people through the trees by a hill to his left. He guessed they were about fifty metres away. He could see a good deal in the moon’s light, but the men shouting were somewhere in the shadows of the trees. Their voices were sharp and mean, three of them, maybe four. Then some other man screamed, Leave me alone! In his fear he almost sounded like a woman. Painted Tongue got up on his haunches, rocking slowly and humming quietly, Where are the police? They sleep in their cruisers while men are beaten in High Park.

  They were hitting the man with the high voice. Painted Tongue held on to himself tighter. The man was wailing now, and his pain filtered through the trees with the thud of boots and open hands on flesh followed by screams. Painted Tongue searched hard for his warrior song but it wouldn’t come. This man needs help, he hummed. They are hurting him bad.

  This was an empty part of the huge park. There was no one around but Painted Tongue and the men hidden in the trees. He could hear the honks of cars far off on Lakeshore Boulevard hundreds of metres over one hill and another. Finally it got quiet again. After a little silence, Painted Tongue stood in a crouch. He wanted to look in the trees. The voices erupted again.

  Motherfuckers! the wounded man screamed.

  He’s running. Grab the bitch!

  A naked man came dashing from the trees towards Painted Tongue with three men close behind him. He was streaked red in the moonlight and ran hard, but with a limp. Painted Tongue dropped quickly into the shadow of a bush without the man’s seeing him and held himself rigid as the other men swooped by.

  They quickly caught up to the wounded one and tackled him. They took turns kicking his head and groin and stomach with their boots. Two had shaved heads and the other wore his hair long like Painted Tongue. They chanted, Dirty faggot, cocksucking faggot, through their clenched teeth. Painted Tongue tried again, but his warrior song would not come. The long-haired one pulled out a knife.

  Don’t. Please don’t, the man on the ground said, curled up and holding himself. He was close enough to Painted Tongue that Painted Tongue could taste the copper tang of fear in his own mouth. The long-haired one dropped down on his knees with both hands held above his head.

  Do it, one of the standing men hissed.

  Stick him. Fuck him, the other said.

  Die, bitch, the long-hair said after a few seconds, then swung down hard. The bleeding man howled. Painted Tongue shivered as the three men ran into the darkness.

  Painted Tongue stood up after a lo
ng while. He slowly walked up to the body on the ground, bent over him and peered down. The man blinked at Painted Tongue and Painted Tongue jumped back quickly. The man’s chest was gurgling and his lips opened just a little. Then his chest stopped moving. Painted Tongue’s legs told him to run away as fast as he could, but instead he hummed a death chant for the man slowly and quietly. Your last moments were spent in fear, he hummed, but now you are peaceful and sink into the waters of sleep. Your last moments were spent in fear and I could not help you, but now all is peaceful as you slip into sleep.

  Painted Tongue thought he could see his own face for a second, reflected in the man’s open eyes, but knew that wasn’t possible. He realized as he ran back towards downtown that the man’s last sight had been of an Indian standing over him and humming, looking down like a death angel, an Indian with a hook nose and black hair almost long enough that it tickled the man’s face.

  Two hours later, Painted Tongue made his way into a bar at Queen Street and Richmond and took a seat in one of the dark corners. He couldn’t sit quietly, so he got up and went into the bathroom and washed his hands and face, then went back to his chair. He wanted a drink. He wanted to get fucked-up drunk. He’d seen two other men die in two years on the street, but both had been old rubbies whose bodies just gave up and quit on them. Those two had prayed every day for death to come and take them. This was different. There was no honour or peace in this man’s death. Painted Tongue sat in his chair, rocking, and hummed, Bad trouble, there is bad trouble and I’ve seen it. He hummed it over and over again. Repeat one hundred times. Write it on the blackboard one thousand times. The old men and younger boys and girls who were crowded around the bar ignored Painted Tongue. They did not understand. When one of them got up to use the washroom, Painted Tongue weighed the odds of being able to grab her unattended drink. He went silent and watched until the people around him forgot he was there. He spotted a full bottle of Labatt’s 50 on a table near him and, when nobody was looking, he grabbed it and drank it down in two gulps.

  That’s it, that’s all, rubby, a big man said, grabbing Painted Tongue by the back of the neck and dragging him out the door. He heard people laughing as the big man gave him a final push, Painted Tongue’s elbow whacking hard against the door frame. I will cut your throat a wide smile with a bottle neck, Painted Tongue moaned as he made his way down the sidewalk. I will count coup on you, smelly bouncer, and take your woman for my own. I will teach your children that you are worthless shit.

  He walked to Kensington Market cradling his bruised elbow and found an alley that didn’t stink so badly of fish. No one bothered you in the alleys here where crates of rotting meat and vegetables were left out for the garbagemen to pick up late at night. Painted Tongue held his hurt elbow as he sat in the alley and thought hard. Other than the beer, he hadn’t had a drink since morning. His body shook and shivered. He wanted a gulp of vodka to take the copper taste out of his mouth. To calm himself he thought about when he was a child and he would sit with his mother on the rock jetty facing Christian Island. She liked to tell him stories of his father and the Ojibwe.

  He hummed himself the story of his father, and his mother’s words came pouring back in the alley. His father had been hired with other men at the Cedar Point Rez to build bridges in the bay, roads running up into the sky that linked the big islands to the mainland. The government thought that Indians had good balance high up in the air above the water, so building bridges was fine work for them. And the Indians were good at their job, Painted Tongue’s mother told Painted Tongue as they sat on the jetty facing Christian Island and its lighthouse. The Indians scampered around on thin beams way up in the sky and the men didn’t use safety lines because safety lines were for women. At Manitoulin Island Painted Tongue’s father fell from a bridge and drowned when a big wind blew up off the bay. The Iroquois wind spirit — the blowing spirit — did it, Painted Tongue’s mother told him, because the Iroquois and Ojibwe were old enemies. The Ojibwe made friends with the Jesuits long ago, and the Iroquois tortured and killed the black robes because they considered the black robes devils. But trouble between the two tribes had always been, from the time the earth was born.

  That night he tried hard in the alley to remember his mother’s story of how the earth came to be. He recalled her saying that before there was such a thing as land, a giant turtle rose up out of the water. Eventually, rocks and trees and animals and finally Nmishoomsag, the Grandfathers, sprouted from the turtle’s back. Painted Tongue remembers the look in his mother’s eyes, her stare out towards Christian Island. She believed the stories she told, and this made Painted Tongue want to believe them too.

  It was the middle of the night now, and it would be impossible to find Kyle. But Kyle always knew what was going on.

  He always had the right answers. Even though he walked a different circle than Painted Tongue did, they’d both had the vision of the turtle. Kyle’s was in paint and Painted Tongue’s was in concrete. Although Painted Tongue hadn’t talked in years, hadn’t actually spoken in words for many years, he felt he wanted to talk again. He wanted to tell Kyle about the man getting killed in front of his eyes. He wanted to tell Kyle about the huge building growing out of the ground, the way it resembled a giant turtle with its roof nearly in place. Strange things were happening all around Painted Tongue, and they were frightening. All of these events were omens warning him that something big and awful was coming. A new turtle had risen on the waterfront, a new world had been born in front of his own eyes over the last year, and Painted Tongue needed to know its significance. Big men were hurting smaller ones; three killed one and another had smashed Painted Tongue’s elbow. He needed Kyle to sit down with him and talk it out. He needed a drink bad.

  He felt calmer just before the morning broke. He walked from the alley and began the trek to the lake and his boulder, walking quickly and quietly underneath the expressway. There were men who lived in cardboard boxes and old refrigerators there, men who didn’t want others like them in their territory. They stashed bricks and pipes and sharp shards from bottles. They’d chased Painted Tongue many times before, whooping and hollering, shouting, Cut up the wagon-burner.

  Painted Tongue made it safely to the water and shimmied up his boulder, then turned east to watch the rising sun. Just as the sun’s rays crawled then shot over the grain elevators and shipyards, dense, low clouds scuttled up on the horizon from the lake. It wouldn’t be much of a sunrise today. He loved feeling the sun’s warmth crawling across the water and rocks, the heat settling on his face. He lay back with his arms outstretched, let his hair fall down the boulder’s side, shivered in the dawn, then curled up to sleep for a few hours.

  His stomach woke him. This day is the colour of a pigeon, he hummed, and the forecast calls for pigeon shit. His stomach was empty and burning and made him feel sick. He crawled from the boulder, dropped his pants and squatted. The evil poured from him in a stinking rush.

  He was hungry and he needed food in his belly. Then he could hustle change and get a mickey in the afternoon. He walked slowly up to Spadina and Bloor, stopping occasionally to catch his breath. He’d considered walking his circle around the stadium. It would give him a chance to sort out the troubles of last night, maybe offer him a clear direction to take, but now saw that the construction workers had put up a large fence on the lake side of the stadium. They were already busy levelling the ground for parking spaces.

  It wasn’t a good thing to go without a drink for long. His luck had been bad lately. He wanted the man who’d been killed in front of him last night to have disappeared like a bad dream this morning. All of this was bad. No more walks around the construction. They’d broken his circle. No good could come from it.

  When he walked into the hallway of the Native Centre, he saw Agnes sitting in a chair reading a newspaper. He recognized the man’s face taking up most of the front page. Above the picture the words “Hate Crime” were written.

  Ahnee Anishnaabe, she spoke
, looking up to him. Hello, Indian. Aanish ezhwebiziiyan? What is the matter with you? You’ve hurt your nose. Painted Tongue leaned on the wall. You look sick, she continued. You need food. I’ll get you a hot dog.

  They walked to a cart on Bloor, then cut up a side street to a little park. Agnes spoke to Painted Tongue slowly between bites of her food. He kept trying to sneak glimpses at her newspaper, but she’d folded it and left it sitting on the bench beside her. Your old friend Kyle is doing good, she said. The McMichael Gallery has been asking about him. He’s got another girlfriend again, and they moved to the Beaches together.

  Painted Tongue noticed that Agnes didn’t say anything about Kyle asking after him. The smell of the cooked meat made his stomach feel worse.

  The government’s starting some new work programs up north, Agnes continued. It isn’t my business, but maybe you should go back to Cedar Point for a while. You can rest there, maybe find some work.

  Painted Tongue nodded his head slowly to be polite. Agnes stopped talking for a long while. Finally, she said, You can come over to my place and clean yourself up. I’ll do some laundry for you. You can have a hot shower. Painted Tongue nodded a thank you. Again she went silent and they listened to squirrels and the traffic on Bloor.

  When it was time for Agnes to head back to work, she gave Painted Tongue ten dollars. He knew that she knew he’d buy booze with the money, and her eyes told him she didn’t like it but was doing it anyway. He held onto her newspaper as she was leaving. Agnes looked down to him, then handed it over.

  Painted Tongue sat by himself and read the words. The man was a jogger. He was a lawyer. He was a gay. The newspaper was calling it a hate crime, a crime against a minority. Painted Tongue hated when people called him a minority. It made him feel small. The police were looking for leads and witnesses. He wanted to leave the bench now. He wanted to go find a field to lie in and watch the clouds. He wanted to find Kyle and take him to a field away from the noise and traffic and all the people living. He’d seen the minority murdered. His circle had been broken. Painted Tongue would find Kyle and surprise him by talking to him.