I guess.
Damned Brody. I was so mad in church that he would drink again after half killing himself that it made my blood fierce for war with him.
The rest of Christmas went fine, went great. Dad spoiled us. My brothers and I laughed. I chopped wood, got strong, breathed fresh air, was around fire again. My folks had split years ago so we made daily phone calls to Mom. Little did we know that the cancer was on its way.
Brody came up to me in the drug store a few days later.
“I need to speak to you,” he said.
“Now?”
“Maybe in an hour.”
“Okay,” I lied. “I’ll be here.” Yeah right, I thought: promise breaker.
I left for the Mary Kaeser Library and deliberately let three hours slide. I didn’t even walk by the drug store when I went home. Why should I go back to Brody when he’s just going to break his word? He can’t be trusted. I’ve seen him drunk my whole life. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sober.
Here, our coolest elders and some of our outstanding youth have passed on and the drunks remain, pickling themselves for decades on misery and booze, non-contributors who live while cancer eats good people from the inside out alive. Why? I left Smith for Yellowknife to be with my mom for New Year’s and tried to forget everything I saw in Smith.
A few months later, my dad and I were at my grandmother’s funeral in Indiana. This was my grandmother on my father’s side.
“Oh,” he said, on the way to the funeral. “Remember Norma, from Smith. You went to school with her?”
I remembered her at the church with Brody. “Yeah, how is she?”
My dad frowned and made a slitting motion with his finger across his throat.
“No....”
He nodded. “In the hospital. She took her own life.”
“Pills or rope?” I asked.
He swung his head back and forth, didn’t know.
“She had a girl….” I said.
“She lost the girl to Social Services.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Crack.”
We drove on in silence. What happened? NDNs and Inuit on crack cocaine, no less. Who would have thought? Oh I was mad. The truth was I didn’t know the north anymore. I’d lived in BC for so long.
So now here we were, Brody and I, outside the hospital.
“The next time I saw you,” I said, “you were at midnight mass, with Norma.”
“Was I?”
I nodded. “You stood with her. I heard she took her own life.”
He bowed his head the same way he did in church and nodded.
“I don’t understand what happened.”
“She lost her girl, hung herself in the hospital.”
I looked away. What the hell was she doing with you? I wondered.
“Sad.”
“Yeah.”
I could smell the smoke from Fort Smith, a ten-hour drive from Yellowknife. There were forest fires around the town and the wind was blowing north. A ten-hour drive and we could both be at Norma’s grave. We watched a Ram 3500 tow-truck drive by.
“You came to me in the drugstore a few days after we took you to the hospital. You said you wanted to talk to me.”
He nodded. “I remember now.”
“So what did you want to say to me?”
“Why didn’t you come back?” he asked.
“I had to go home and chop wood for my dad,” I lied.
“When you gotta chop wood, you gotta chop wood.”
“Yuh.”
“I wanted to say thank you.” He held out his hand. I shook it. “Where is your grandmother—can I meet her?”
I was surprised. “Sure.”
We went back into the hospital and Brody went humble NDN on us, like in midnight mass, and he was polite as hell. Brody shook my mom’s hand, NDN style, once and gently, and then he took my grandmother’s hand and she looked way up to him and smiled and then he shook my brother’s hand.
My grandfather, Pierre, passed away two Julys ago. We miss him so much and have noticed so much sobriety in our family after his passing. They say the old ones can do more work on the other side and can take a lot of pain and suffering with them when they go.... Maybe he took the pain of our family away once and for all. But why couldn’t he spot Mom’s cancer?
I remembered what my ehtsi said the last time we visited her in Rae. My mom translated for her. My grandma said:
“When you lose your husband, it is the most miserable feeling. You sit. You sit. You think of the fights you had. What does it matter now? You say stupid things when you fight. Now, it doesn’t matter who won, who lost, who was right or who was wrong. What does it matter now?
“I miss him. I miss cooking for him, making his meals. I miss telling stories to him. I keep thinking he is out visiting or shopping for us and that he’ll be home any minute. He could walk through the door any second. But he’s not coming back. So I sit. I sit and I wait.
“He came to me a few nights ago, his spirit, and told me to start wearing colours again. I had to move on. He said I had to let go and move on. We will never do those things that we loved to do together ever again. When we got together, we did not have kids for five years because I knew nothing. He had to show me everything because I was a tomboy. He showed me how to cook, how to sew, how to be. Now I sit alone,” she said. “Now I sit alone.”
Then she burst into tears and we all cried in our own way with her. I remember that beside my grandfather’s grave is my cousin’s. He took his own life in 1990.
I remember after visiting both graves, a golden eagle flew high above Mom’s van. It was so beautiful. I had never seen an eagle fly so hard for so long, alone. We dropped tobacco again. It flew all the way to Yellowknife with us and we called the eagle Grandpa, ehtse. I was in awe of the power of our family.
I was in awe of how polite Brody was right now, talking and laughing with my mom and brothers. The dichotomy of drunks has always floored me: how beautiful and pathetic they can be.
Well, that was it. Grandma wanted to go back to her room. We said goodbye to Brody. I said I’d drop tobacco for his operation tomorrow, and we said goodbye. I looked at my mom. I’ll never forget how scared we were when we had to say goodbye to her before she went for her operation. To think something the size of a blueberry had brought us all to this. We then escorted my grandmother up to her room. “I want to go home,” she said in English.
We’d brought her a bucket of KFC to cheer her up. As we got her settled, I thought about how my grandmother had her own dog team when she was fifteen, and ran twenty miles in one day in snowshoes she’d made herself to go get chewing tobacco for her mother! I saw her now as the last in the line of ancient royalty for our family as she made the sign of the cross three times before the bucket of KFC and got to work….
Dogrib Midnight Runners
I guess how we got this whole thing started was I was sitting at the trailer one night thinking about Justin, thinking about his life. There was this article they ran in the Community News a few years back where his folks announced that Justin had graduated with honours from Aurora College in Yellowknife. There was a picture of him smiling away with his big glasses and puffy hair just as proud as could be, and I remember raising a glass for him. Even though I never went away for schoolin’ or ever really travelled, I remember feeling happy that someone was putting Fort Smith on the map.
It was then that I remembered something funny about Justin, the one thing that puzzled me about him: when Justin had a little too much to drink, he loved to streak. That’s right. He’d get a glow on at the Buffalo Lounge, go into one of the stalls, take off all of his clothes except his socks, runners and glasses. He’d put his clothes, wallet and belt into a Northern bag and leave it for Country, the bouncer, to come get after Justin made
a run for it.
And he’d run, boy. Justin’d run naked through the bar with the biggest smile on his face and everyone would start whooping it up and clapping. The guys would shake their heads and the women would stand to get a good look at him. I only saw him do it a few times but I know he did it quite a bit this past year. The paper ran a few articles on him and they called him The Slave River Streak: “Sources tell the Community News that ‘The Slave River Streak’ has struck again, running through the potato field last Saturday night at midnight.”
Things like that.
One night, me, Brutus and Clarence were cruising around looking for a bush party when we seen this white bum running down the highway.
“Oh God,” Clarence said.
Brutus shook his head. “I seen it all now!”
I squinted. Sure enough, it was Justin running down the highway. We all started laughing. Justin was running pretty good—found his groove, I guess. We pulled up alongside him and I was riding shotgun. When I rolled down the window—I’ll never forget this—it was a full moon and there was this sheen of sweat on Justin’s chest and shoulders. We started whooping it up and calling out to him but he didn’t look at us. I seen his puffy hair bob with each bounce and I saw the moonlight shine off his glasses. I never told the boys about this, but when I seen his eyes, I swear to God they were closed. Justin was running blind in the moonlight on the highway outside of town with a smile on his face. It was like a smile you see in church from someone who totally believes. It was a smile that scared me because it was a smile I don’t think I ever had or shared. So there we were howling away and Justin kept running….
• • •
His death really hit me hard. I kept thinking, “What broke you, Justin? What could have been so bad that you couldn’t ask for help?” I felt for his folks, his woman. I thought to myself, “Let them find peace, Lord. Every single one of them.”
I remembered Dad used to say that when the Creator takes a life, he gives two. But what happens when we take our own? It was sad and I couldn’t shake it. I thought, “If Justin could kill himself with all he’s done in his life, what’s to stop anyone else?” He was white, healthy, came from a good family, had money, had Sarah, had work—what could have been so bad?
One night I was sitting home watching TV, sipping coffee and I started to wonder: what was it in the streaking that Justin felt so good about that he’d run with his eyes closed? And what did that feel like—to no longer be able to fight the urge to go for it? What was it like the first time he’d gone for it and made it to the Buffalo Lounge bathroom and dropped his drawers? And what was that first morning after like—opening his eyes and smiling, greeting the day, knowing he’d done it?
It’d been a rough year for me. I just couldn’t seem to get on with anything. No job. The thought of one exhausted me. I couldn’t stand the thought of making someone else rich or cleaning up after anyone and so every day I’d get up knowing everyone was gettin’ paid but me. The past six months I kept saying: “Something good’s gotta happen, Lord. Something good. Please.”
I thought of Justin again and that smile I seen, and I figured I wanted to try it. What did I have to lose?
I walked out to the back porch of the trailer and took my clothes off. I slowly opened the door and peaked out. In my part of town, at the Caribou Trailer Court, there’s starlight like you wouldn’t believe. I saw the Big Dipper. Orion. After making sure nobody was around, I crawled naked down my stairs and knelt in my socks and runners. I listened and all I could hear were the rapids far away and my heartbeat racing. “No turning back,” I thought. Thank God I had a fence and thank God they hadn’t completed the subdivision out back. Finally, I stood and looked around. Then I walked around in the soft grass. “My God,” I thought, “there are no bugs.” Maybe they were all at the bush parties.
I hadn’t run since high school and sure felt it when I jogged around the yard a few times, but I felt good. I felt giddy and light. I also felt more alert than I had in years. I started running a little faster and started feeling a little sexy. I was glad Sheena, my neighbour to the right, and her kids were down south for the summer. My other neighbour—what’s her name—had left town and had put her trailer up for sale but, so far, there’d been no takers at all.
So there I was, buck naked—except for my runners and socks—and it was a beautiful night. I opened my gate and jogged behind my house to the east side of the trailer park, through the bush trails. I ran there because they hadn’t put up streetlights yet. I ran and started to feel really good. Really spry as Coach used to say. I started running and that goddamned German shepherd Snoopy, owned by Lucas Spears, come running out growling at me. The first thing I did was freeze and cover my nuts. I guess Snoopy didn’t quite know what to do with me. Here was a skinny, out of shape Dogrib standing there, not moving. He come over and sniffed around.
“Hi, Snoopy,” I whispered. As far as I could see, all the house lights were off for the whole street. “Good boy. Where’s your daddy?” He tilted his head and I reached out and petted him. Pretty soon he was wagging his tail and he followed me back to my house. I went in and shut the door. Whew. That was close. Imagine the Community News getting a hold of that one: “Dog bites Dogrib! (The Tlicho was naked to boot!)”
But it wasn’t enough. I had a taste of something. I started to feel a glow inside. So I went back outside. Snoopy was gone but the stars were still shining. I wanted to run again. By this time it was 1:30. Monday. A school night. A work night. Families were asleep. The gas station was closed. The only folks out would be the cabbies, the card players and the partiers—and they’d be out at the landslide or in somebody’s home.
I listened. No cars. All I felt was the warm breeze and it felt luxurious. This was it. Now or never. I gave ’er down the street and, before I knew it, I was streaking through the back roads of town. I stayed by the bushes in case a truck came around the corner or if there were any stragglers coming home from the bar. I guess the good Lord above took a shine to me because there was no one around. I ran for what seemed like a solid hour and felt something soothingly close to peace.
That night, I had the best sleep I’d had in months. I slept so good and woke up buzzed. I even got up and said a prayer. I prayed for Justin and I prayed for his family. I prayed for his girlfriend and I prayed for my ex. I prayed for my dearly departed parents. I prayed someone special would soon come my way.
That day I went out and started looking for work. I needed to get out of my head, interact, make some dough.
But before I knew it, the day had passed and I was home, had supper, did dishes, put the coffee on. I was re-reading some Stephen King when I felt it: the night was calling me. She was calling me through my open windows. I could hear her in the rumbling of the frogs out past the highway. My blood was humming and I stripped down in my bathroom. I even tried ten push-ups and ten sit-ups.
I went out in the back yard and did ten jumping jacks. I was feeling pretty good. I decided to stick to my trail from last night. I looked around and took off slowly. I felt like a Dogrib ninja in stealth mode. I started picking up the pace, got into a good jog—then something ran up growling behind me. I stopped and covered up. “Oh God,” I said. There was Snoopy, right beside me. He come up to me and started sniffing around.
“Good boy, Snoopy. Good boy. Wanna run with me?”
I don’t know why I said that, but he went from maybe wanting to bite me to ears up, wagging his tail. So that was how Snoopy and I became running buddies. We ran together for a week and we loved it. Our territory grew each night. We ran from the Welfare Centre to Indian Village. I kept having this urge to do like Justin and run across the potato field because that was the heart of our community. If I could run across there I’d feel pretty good about streaking through the field that most townies walked across every day. It would be my little victory. But no: that would take time and a lot of daring. So Snoop
y and I turned around and started running back home. Again, the stars were out and there was that warm breeze. I could hear the rapids far off and wondered what it would be like to run up the landslide on a night when there were no partiers. I was pretty sure that’d feel great, feel wonderful.
I remember Snoopy and I were just pulling up to my house when the headlights hit me. Full force. From what’s her name’s house. Her parking lot. Highbeams! Then I heard laughter. I froze and covered up, having an immediate heart attack. Snoopy
bolted home.
“Grant!” Brutus called out. “What in the hell are you doing?”
Clarence was laughing so hard he fell out of the passenger door. “You…” he kept saying, “You shoulda seen … your face….”
I got so mad I gave them the finger with my free hand and stormed inside my house. I was so ashamed for being caught that I took a shower. I was in there for a while.
“How cheap,” I thought. “Isn’t this typical? You find something that’s all yours, that’s magic and people come and twist it.” Now I’d be the laughing stock of Fort Smith. I was stupid to think I could have something just for me.
After I was done showering, I went into my room and got dressed. There was no way I was going to sleep anytime soon. I got dressed and sat down in the living room. There was a quiet knock on the door. “Go away,” I said.
Again, there was a knock.
“I mean it you guys,” I said. “Go home.”
The door opened and in walked Brutus and Clarence. They were smirking and I gave them the stink eye, shaking my head as I turned up the TV. The boys went to my fridge and opened it up. I stared at the screen and flicked through the channels. Brutus came around the couch and handed me a Coke. I realized how dry I was, so I took it and we popped ours open at the same time, just like always.
We all took long sips and I felt the burn. We always had this contest to see who could chug the longest and it was Brutus who always won. This time it was no different. I came up for air first, Clarence came second and Brutus closed his eyes and downed half the can. After it was done, we all raised our Cokes and thought of the women we wanted most. We’d done this since grade nine. I hit mute and thought of the new Constable’s wife.
The Moon of Letting Go Page 2
