The Life and Death of Eli and Jay

by Francis Gideon

  When Eli didn't answer Jay's taunts, he went on. "Figures you can't answer me. Probably looking out to see when the weather's gonna get ya. What good are Tantoo's stories when they only keep you scared?"

  "And your story doesn't scare you?" Eli shot back, upset Tantoo's name had been invoked. "Even when it's about death?"

  "Hell, no. I now know who I am. And where to go. I have no cares in the world, which is more than I can say about you, Eli."

  Jay turned back to greet his friends, slapping a couple high fives before shooting the basketball again. It bounced off the rim, then dunked clear through the centre. Eli braced himself for more teasing—even from Percy and Gerard close by—but nothing came. Everyone went on with their lives as they normally lived them, as if the confrontation hadn't happened at all. As if Eli wasn't there at all.

  Eli watched the game for a few more minutes. He saw the way Charlie and Jay's eyes caught one another, lingered, and then how their fingers brushed as they passed the ball back and forth. Eli could feel the sparks between them. He envied the connection he had once felt with Jay before it had been tossed aside. With a quick huff, Eli grabbed his backpack and left the court, though he was sure no one noticed that he was gone.

  Maybe Jay was right. Even if Jay liked to kiss boys the way other boys their age kissed girls, at least he kissed someone. Eli didn't like to kiss anyone at all, because it often led to sex. Maybe his grandmother hadn't said a thing about his behaviour, or his lack of behaviour, because she was trying to keep him for herself. He was all Tantoo had; if he left like his father or mother, where would she go? She needed to keep him a boy, the baby that lightning made, forever.

  Eli ran all the way home. When he tore into the small house, Tantoo startled from her sewing work.

  "My dear," she gasped. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

  He wrapped his grandmother in a hug that was unprovoked—but that was unquestioned as she laid her arms across him. Eli felt her glance outside to see if there was a storm. When the sun surely greeted her, she didn't question a thing. She only curled her hands through Eli's hair and hummed a small song from his childhood in Siksika.

  "There, there," she whispered. "Nothing's gonna hurt you, not when you're with me."

  *~*~*

  Eli and Jay didn't talk much after that. Eli was too busy studying, trying to get better grades, so he could do something with his life. Eli was never quite sure what that "something" was, but he figured that maybe it would allow him to get off the rez. That's what most of his teachers told him, anyway.

  "Have you ever heard of Tomson Highway?" Mrs. Cherry, his English teacher, asked him after school one day.

  "I don't think so," Eli answered. "Why? Do you know him?"

  Mrs. Cherry smiled. Her skin was light, especially during the winter, but she was part of the same Blackfoot tribe that Eli was from. Just outside her door, he could hear the steady thumping of a basketball and the low murmured laughter of Jay and his friends. Eli shifted in his seat, and tried to focus on Mrs. Cherry's light eyes and her warm smile.

  "No, I don't know him. Not personally, anyway."

  "Usually people mention someone when they know them. Or want to know them."

  "That's true. But I think you should read some of his work. His books are really good—he had a hard life, but he managed to spin stories out of it."

  "I already know people who do that," Eli said. "Why should I read Tomson?"

  "Because you may find that you have more in common with him than you think."

  Before Eli could disagree, and didn't we all have something in common with one another, she slid him a thin book with bold red writing on the cover. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.

  "It's a play," she elaborated. "It's usually better if you read plays together, with someone else, but you can also read them alone."

  Eli nodded, thanking Mrs. Cherry for the book. When he got home that night, Tantoo saw the red writing from across the room.

  "What do you have for me?" she asked with a smile.

  "Oh…" Eli took the book out and the read the title aloud to Tantoo, who furrowed her brows.

  "You're saying it wrong. Ka-pu-ska-sing. Why do you have this?"

  "Mrs. Cherry—my English teacher—gave me it to read. It's a play."

  "You don't read plays," Tantoo said, shaking her head. "At least, you don't read them in your head."

  "That's what Mrs. Cherry said."

  "Good. She has some common sense." Tantoo put down her sewing and then flung her braids over her shoulders. She shifted on the couch and then patted the spot next to her. "Come sit with me, Eli. Let's see what your English teacher is on about… and why Tomson wrote in English. Pfft."

  "She told me he wrote them in Cree first. So when the translations for Cree came out a few years ago, they were really the originals. It just depended on how you framed things."

  "Shhh," Tantoo said. She read aloud the cast of characters, assigning Eli most of the major parts, followed by one of the tricksters. Then they began to read aloud.

  Eli admitted—it was a lot easier to follow along with someone else there, who could hear and imagine the sad bits of the play as well as the good. For a moment, especially as they got to the romance section of the play, Eli could understand why people got married. They wanted someone around to hear their mistakes as well as their stories, so they could help them pronounce the names of places they had never been to before.

  When Tantoo got too thirsty to continue, Eli went inside their small kitchen and made them tea. He brought out cold leftovers too, since it was well past dark and they had not eaten yet. He wasn't sure if Tantoo had eaten at all that day, given how thin she had become over winter and how cold her fingertips were.

  "Where is Kapuskasing?"

  "Close."

  "How close?"

  "A couple thousand miles."

  "That's not close."

  Tantoo narrowed her eyes playfully. "It is if you know someone. All distances can be covered if we know who we're going to. Then all of Canada becomes so tiny it can fit in the palm of your hand."

  Eli nodded and took a sip of his tea. "Do you know anyone there?"

  "No, not for a long time."

  "Why do we stay in one place?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "We used to move around, right? That's what history books say. But now we're in one place, all the time, never leaving."

  "We live on the reserve," Tantoo answered, her voice thin, as if she knew it wasn't a good answer. "And I suppose I like staying here. I've gotten used to it. All the people I like are here." After Tantoo winked, she looked down at her hands and the wrinkles that covered them. She was not the oldest person on the rez—not even Jay's grandmother was—but he could tell she felt old in that moment.

  "Could I leave the rez?" Eli asked. "Mrs. Cherry says I could."

  "Sure," Tantoo said.

  Eli hadn't been expecting that. No story about lightning, nothing about origins, just a simple 'sure.' "Really?"

  "Sure, Eli. You're a smart boy. You keep studying and you could do whatever you want."

  Eli thought back to all the people who had left the rez: people like his mother, who had never come back. There were others who left, like Jay's dad too, but they really disappeared like a ghost. Everyone else, especially those who studied, left the rez and then came back. It was like a sling-shot or a yo-yo; the people who never came back had broken something integral. Eli didn't think there was any other way someone could leave. Unless you were Tomson Highway, of course.

  "You know words," Tantoo expanded. "When you know words, you can go farther and father, because words give you access to people. And it's people who pull you forward."

  "Ay-yeah," Eli said. "But who will take care of you, Grandma?"

  "I'm fine. I've done enough. That's why we're a community. We look after each other when no one else will."

  "But what about the outside world?" Eli pressed, the thought beyond the rez
still scary to him. He held the book in his hand and felt the weight of its burden. "Aren't the people out there like the white men in here?"

  "Maybe," Tantoo said, "but it's better to know how bad it could be, and still go anyway, than to never experience the good in between."

  Eli was out of words then. He flipped back through Tomson Highway's play. "Do you want to keep going?"

  "No, dear. Save the ending for another rainy night. I think I'll make some real dinner now."

  Eli remained on the couch, even as the scent of fry bread wafted through the house. He flipped to the last page of the book, hoping he could spoil the ending for himself. All he saw was Tomson Highway's biography. The last line of it read: Highway lives in Ontario and France with his partner of twenty-nine years. Maybe, Eli thought again, marriage isn't so bad, because it means going to different places. But all marriages meant sex, and Eli didn't want that at all. He had heard the world asexual tossed around in class before, and though it only seemed to apply to plant life or bacteria, he liked it. He could work with that, in some way. Eli left Tomson Highway down on the couch and walked to the window again.

  Even in the dark of the rez, Eli saw a man in a green jacket slip inside of the Red Feather house. Not someone Eli recognized from school, but a white guy, maybe five or so years older than even Jay. Eli swallowed hard and imagined what was going on through the other side of the wall. Their clothes would pile up on the floor. Jay would pull the white guy on top of him. They would kiss, first with lips and then with tongues, and then their bodies would fade together. It wasn't hard to figure out everything that could happen, even if Eli wanted no part of it. It was just bodies, skin on skin; Eli didn't mind that. It was the stuff the followed from skin on skin that had another meaning that Eli didn't want. Eli only ever wanted bits and pieces, never the full picture.

  "Do you have a girl you like yet?" Tantoo asked him at the table that night.

  "Nah," Eli said.

  "I think you should get a girl. Keep you in line," she said, smirking. "Or is Mrs. Cherry your girl?"

  Eli blushed. He thought Mrs. Cherry was beautiful—one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen—but she was off-limits. He shook his head. "She's married."

  "So?"

  "You can't have people who are married."

  "You can't ever have anyone, Eli. People own themselves. But feelings come and go, and that's okay. You can like Mrs. Cherry—just be sure you don't get in her way."

  "I won't be a problem," Eli said with a sad sigh. "And if I am, then I suppose I'll move to Kapuskasing."

  "Kapu—" Tantoo corrected.

  "Kapuskasing."

  "Better."

  Later that week, when Eli saw the man in the green jacket come back to Jay's house, he didn't look away and he didn't imagine what was going on inside. Instead, he felt his heartbeat quicken and remembered the way Jay's hands had felt in his. The way his lips had felt on his. Kissing was okay, he decided. Even if Jay didn't want to do it anymore and wanted more than what Eli wanted, he still had the memories and the feelings. That was all he needed.

  When Tantoo noticed the boy in the green jacket come out of the Red Feather house, she sighed and shook her head.

  "That poor kid," she murmured.

  "What? Jay?"

  "Yeah."

  Eli held his breath, anticipating the worst. Tantoo merely scolded, "Jay should know better. He shouldn't be bringing white boys back here. Even if he is selling cigarettes. Do that on their turf, not ours. Then do whatever you want with them there."

  Both of them watched Jay and the man in the green jacket. Jay touched the side of his mouth, as if he had to wipe something away, before he clutched a packet of cigarettes and handed it off to the man. Money was exchanged between hands, then the green-jacket man drove away in a car that was too quiet on the reserve dirt roads. At least Jay had a job now. He had graduated from high school that fall, but still hadn't disappeared from the basketball courts. Even if the job was selling the non-taxed cigarettes to white boys, and then having sex with them as an afterthought, it was better than drinking the rest of his life away.

  And at least Eli's grandmother hadn't had an issue with the fact that Jay had been with a boy. Not everyone on the reserve was okay with that type of behaviour. Even when Jay had been with Charlie, his sisters made faces at him and didn't like to acknowledge what they were doing alone in the room when the walls shook. It was weird, because most of them were expressing distaste about sex. Kissing, touching, holding hands with same-sex people was tolerable, if not okay. But as soon as it became something more, people were uncomfortable and didn't like to talk. It was different than the lack of sexual attraction that Eli felt, though. He could tell that right away because this type of aversion to sex only applied to gay people.

  Tomson Highway had experienced the same problems as Jay, Eli had later learned from Mrs. Cherry. Even if the Natives were always stereotyped as free-loving, nearly hippies themselves, with the influence of the missionaries, the reserves, and white men in general, it was hard to decipher what was brought on from genuine culture or influence. The way people felt about gay men, both in and outside of the reserve, was difficult to predict.

  "You know, Eli," Tantoo said when they sat down to dinner. "We never finished that play you had."

  "No, but that's okay. I think I already know how it ends."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah," Eli said, his smile weak. "Besides, I'd think I'd just like to eat for now."

  *~*~*

  The same day the house had been struck by lightning nineteen years earlier, Eli found out that Jay's grandmother had died. Jay was twenty and still selling cigarettes to white boys in vans who had traveled sometimes over twenty miles from a nearby town to get to the reserve. Eli heard the news from Tantoo first. She had gone out that morning to sell her quilts in the farmer's market, only to turn around and come back inside, her face white and ashen.

  "Where is Jay?" she asked.

  Eli raised his eyes from his book, unsure of what she meant. He hadn't been hanging around with Jay for years, but in his grandmother's mind, she always saw them together.

  "I don't know. I usually don't know."

  "And that's why I'm upset with you. Find him. Buffy's just died."

  Eli felt the years fall away between himself and Tantoo. He was a twelve-year-old kid to her then, and she scolded him as if he had forgotten to wash the dishes or left the stove on too long. He stood and grabbed his jacket, though it was the middle of summer, and then went to find Jay by the broken traffic light. But he wasn't at his normal corner for selling cigarettes. Eli wandered around the rez general store and the radio station, before he turned towards the blue painted house. The walls seemed to shake like they often did from sex or storms—only this time, Eli knew it was from grief.

  Eli knocked slowly. When the door was pulled open by Susie, the youngest sister, he kept his feet planted firmly on the wooden porch stairs.

  "I'm sorry to hear," Eli said.

  Susie nodded and let him inside. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her hands shook, but she was the most put together of the Red Feather household. Murmurs of crying echoed up from the floorboards and the smell of cooked meat was pungent, strong. The elder members of the community were with the oldest daughter still in the house, Gabi, who still had tear stains on her face. Gabi told the men Buffy's final instructions: she would be prepared and then driven to the morgue and cremated. Most people, at least in the Red Feather house, wanted to be ashes.

  In the meantime, cousins filled the room where Jay and Eli had charged up static electricity and spilled out into the hallways and bedrooms. The kitchen was full of food and people cooking more food, as if excess kept away sadness. Eli had never been around this much grief before. Even his father's death hadn't caused this much of a stir in the earth.

  Then again, Eli's family was small and compact. The Red Feathers were scattered all across the Star Belt reserve and the whole of Canada. Eli und
erstood how knowing people shrunk the land, until all of Canada could fit inside a small, dilapidated house that was painted sky-blue. Eli had spent so much of his childhood here, he took his time to go through the cramped rooms, remembering Buffy in his own way, until he finally spotted Jay.

  Behind a wall of people sat Jay at the kitchen table. Black coffee was in his left hand and a cake from Miss Leonora down the street was in front of him, only one bite taken out. Everyone else seemed to talk around Jay, a loud cacophony of noises. As Eli got closer, he noticed the small marks around Jay's neck—the hickeys and small cuts from the man he'd been with when he got the news.

  Eli pulled back a chair and sat at the table with Jay. He didn't say a thing.

  "We didn't realize she was sick," Jay finally said. He didn't look up from his coffee, but his voice was directed at Eli.

  "You never do."

  "How come she could see my death, but not hers? Why couldn't she warn me?"

  "Because you never know your own story. People have to tell it to you. Right?"

  "Right." Jay nodded. When he lifted his eyes to Eli, the years between them passed. Jay's expression moved from profound grief to simple tenderness as he pushed his hands forward. Their fingers brushed, but didn't linger.

  "Do you want coffee?" Jay asked.

  "No," Eli shook his head, "but I'd love some cake."

  *~*~*

  Three weeks later, Buffy's ashes were on the mantelpiece in the Red Feather household. Next to her urn was Maggie's wedding picture—she had married the tall Navajo boy that Eli had heard through the wall before he had seen him. On the other side of Buffy's urn was another small snapshot of Jay and Eli when they were kids inside a tacky red frame. Eli realized, later on, that that was probably the first picture that Jay had seen of himself; it was his only proof that he had not been born yesterday. For Eli, it was proof that they had been close once, and therefore, they could be close again.