by Rudy Wiebe
And Dad screaming outside the door, Open up! Who’re you sleeping with, you fucken whore, whoren around in the bed I give you in my own house! I brace myself to hold the door shut, but the redhead is still passed out and Dad comes through the door all over me. He’s slamming me around like he’s never done before; I’m bouncing off the walls, off the floor, he’s clawed tight into my hair and hammers me with his fist, beating me stupid, drags me out of the room to his couch. He stops an instant and rips his hands back through his hair and starts again, Used fucken goods anyhow—you give it to him, you’ll give it to me. I’m a man too.
He starts going through the motions, but stops. He’ll get rid of the redhead first, but if I leave he’ll kill me. He goes into the bedroom and I run out of the house.
“After the attempted attack by my father,” Yvonne tells me, “I was grown up. I moved in with Leon. He had taken over Liz’s apartment; he beat her up once too often and she finally left with her little boy and new baby girl she had with him.”
“You moved in with Leon, alone?”
“I was figuring things out, how to stay alive. I couldn’t live with Dad; even if I barricaded my room, or slept in the dirt basement again—which I didn’t really want to—I still had to use the bathroom, and the fridge to eat sometimes. And Leon was actually okay: he had ass around, so I seemed safe. Ellie lived with him now, she and her baby girl, and several other women were there too. He took them in turns or all of them in his room at once. I tried to find a boyfriend to keep me safe from him. He’d picked up an expensive stereo and tape player by giving the log peeler we used for logging as collateral, and he was mad when one speaker was broken after he threw it at Liz and took a chunk out of her leg.
“That was the only furniture. I slept on a mattress in my own room with an American flag for a blanket. We didn’t pay rent and the electricity was cut, but he knew how to jump-wire it at the meter. We always had music. There was never anything to eat in the fridge and I went to parties and ate what I found, and drank. Only whisky then, only the smoothest Kentucky, Kessler’s. Same as Grandpa Louie.”
Yvonne started to learn day-by-day, take-whatever-whoever-comes life. The Community Education Program had focused her days, though the so-called life-education courses themselves, she tells me, taught her nothing except how to get involved with people twice her age, mostly the biggest dope addicts and dealers in Butte. She never got into heavy drugs—she had neither the interest nor the money—but she smoked to relax at parties when it was offered, and began trying beer as a chaser for whisky. She drank with Leon and his friends. She drank with almost anyone.
“I felt so low and shy, I could not talk to anyone except when drinking. You could not get me to talk sober, least of all to Whites, professionals like doctors, cops, priests.”
She was learning a particular kind of survival from street experts.
“There was no family to show me,” she continues. “I was alone, hiding, knocking around alone. When stoned, I could fool myself into relaxing. But always alert not to get caught. At Leon’s at least I had an empty room to sleep in.
“Sometimes Leon would send his buddies to invite me to join them, but I wouldn’t. Sex was something people did, I never got anything out of it and when men did it to me they felt so manly they usually wanted more. I was never in my life a hooker, but I think I know how they can work because I always felt uninvolved—huh! if every man who fucked me over had paid me, I’d be rich. I couldn’t figure out why everyone thought sex so important. Mom always told me it was all men were after—they’ll fuck anything—which never made sense to me, though it obviously did to some girls I knew. The best I could say for sex was I got through it without too much pain; if I had the choice and felt I had to please a man, I’d let him do it. And I could really fake it—men only notice themselves anyway—and I could be any man’s dream, they went nuts for me. But I never made eye contact: just concentrate on something else, fake it, get it over with.”
After a long pause she adds, staring across the counselling room at P4W, “I know I’ve sometimes been a fool. I know I’ve often hurt people. I know I was involved in one monstrous act. And I’ve hurt myself, so much, so often. How can it end this way? It’s got to be for some reason that all this happened. There are times in my life when I’ve thought: if this is reality I’d rather be insane. I guess you could describe me that way: insane by reason of reality.”
She adds later, in her journals, concerning the coming summer of 1978: “My life continued horrible, though I did not try to kill myself, not then. My operations had been very successful but trying to live with Dad in the same house was impossible. Suicide was always there, starting in Grade Seven. I don’t know what had set me off … being alive, I guess.
“I see now that most children, growing up, are taught options, choices, personal strategies. I never was, and even though I understood that choices must exist, they couldn’t mean anything to a dirty ‘breed’ like me. There were just two possibilities: get by, or commit suicide.
“I can now understand Jung when he talks of suicide as a goal. It can become, as it seems, the one goal you can always try hard to reach if life becomes too bad. It’s the final release, though by death.”
And she shifts to an earlier suicide story: “Once, on a school trip to Yellowstone Park, that must have been about Grade Eight, fourteen, when Kathy was in Butte for a little while, they’d been calling me ‘pud-lips, suck-your-brother’s-cock lips,’ and a big cop’s son beat me up on the bus, and when we got to the geysers I kept on walking and tried to jump into one. Just end it, disappear in the hot, boiling earth. Everybody was yelling as I stood on the fencing around the pit, trying to think my final thought, crying, then Kathy got me down and led me back into the bus. I locked myself inside the bus toilet till we left. I wouldn’t go back to Grade Eight, and the woman from Teen Challenge came and I toured a home and a reformatory for girls with her, but there was no place; I belonged nowhere.
“Mom roaming Western Canada looking for work with whatever kids could trek along with her, Dad rooted in his house in Butte on a five-year drinking binge—our family didn’t have to stay together to prey on each other.”
Another sardonic frown: “Our family wasn’t much for weddings either,” she says. “I don’t remember being at one, but we had plenty of funerals to keep on bugging each other. Dad was so mad when Grandpa Louie died, he was convinced ‘those nurse bitches’ had shoved him down the stairs—he was only 102, I guess he was supposed to live forever—but he took Leon and me with him in his logging truck to the funeral.”
I have jotted down that essential date from the papers in Clarence’s indispensable box: Louis Johnson, born 15 April 1876, buried 11 July 1978, Chinook, Montana.
“In a mortuary hall,” Yvonne tells me. “Both Grandpa and Dad hated everything churchly. He said life must have come from a big bang volcanic eruption under the sea or something. It’s six, seven hours to Chinook in that truck, and all the way Dad was drinking—we’d make a pit stop at every bar and gas station for beer. And he was mad at me. ‘You’re such a liar,’ he’d yell at me. I’m right beside him on the seat with Leon driving but he yells, ‘He lives all these years, born in the centennial year of the Republic and celebrating two hundred Big Ones and what does he get for it? His fucken granddaughter calls him a dirty old man. Jesus Christ, you’re a natural-born liar!’’
“He kept on, he really rolled into it. ‘C’mon,’ he’s nudging me, crying and drinking from cans he doesn’t even shove out of sight when a car passes, ‘you’re a natural, say something and it’ll be a lie. Say something!’ ”
“So I say something. ‘You’re really good-looking,’ I tell him.
“ ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Finally she tells the truth.’ ”
Yvonne continues, deadpan: “Leon started laughing. He pulled over, got out of the truck, and leaned against the hood. He was laughing to bust a gut, and I got out too. We were bouncing off each other.
&
nbsp; “And Dad was cursing us. He goosed the motor and took off. Leon and I were left on the shoulder of that long Montana highway, nothing left but to hitchhike into Chinook. The funeral was next day and Mom and the other kids were already in a hotel. Dad got mad when they opened the coffin: ‘Where’s his cowboy hat? He won’t be buried without his hat—and his boots? He’s got to wear his boots!’ They brought Grandpa’s hat and he put it on him and that was better. So we buried him; a few of the old guys and the head nurse said something and that was it.
“And afterwards, as usual, there was arguing. Mom and Dad were together again, nothing to do but quarrel, this time about why it hadn’t worked out with me taking care of him. They never asked me a word about it. In our family the grown-ups argued and we kids shut up, not a word out of you, especially me, who if I wasn’t completely stupid was probably crazy. They got so well into their old fighting groove that Mom came to Butte for a few days. I went back to Leon’s place. It was empty, no food, just two mattresses and the stereo on the bare floor.”
I ask Yvonne, “Did you look at him in his coffin?”
She’s remembering hard, very inward as she often is. “His face was always white, round, old, and bald, smiling. But they made him up so badly, like they do. I felt sorry I hit him, I felt so sorry I let him down.”
“So, you went back to Butte,” I say. “Your operations had been successful. You could speak.”
“Just because I was capable of speaking doesn’t mean I did. I had nothing to say, even if I wanted to talk. Hell! What people take for granted—nothing was ‘granted’ to this little bitch. I was always hiding. If I was sober I felt so low I couldn’t even give simple directions to people when they asked me.”
“And you were still in Butte. Did you go live with your dad?”
“Never again.”
“You stayed with Leon?”
“Not long,” she says, looking straight at me. “I ran. That’s all I really knew how to do. That son of a rich Butte family was dead, Frank Shurtliffe now in jail charged for his death, I think, and the whole town gossiped about me being there.”
“But you’d gone to court, you’d pleaded guilty to the only offence you were charged with.”
She smiles grimly. “Sure, I had dealt with official law. But in Butte there’s cop law too, and that one really counts. Inside a week of Grandpa’s funeral a big cop saw me walking and stopped his cruiser to explain it to me, in case I didn’t know for sure.
“ ‘Johnson,’ he says to me, ‘you’re a nobody, and you killed a somebody. If you’re ever in jail, you might hang yourself.’ ”
“That’s pretty clear.”
“Two evenings later,” she continues, “he has me in his cop-shop, not the one where they killed Earl but that makes no difference. I was walking with Minnie—she stayed on with Dad after the funeral—and I’d tried a beer, and this cop saw me throw the can over my shoulder on the sidewalk and he arrested me for littering. Handcuffs for a beer can. He slugged me so fast, so hard, I was sprawled out on the back seat of his cruiser before the can hit the ground. He orders me to sit down in a chair, and when I try he kicks the chair aside and I crash to the floor. ‘See?’ he says to his deskman. ‘She’s out of it, book her for drugs too.’ ”
She sits motionless, staring into space. Finally I say, “How did you get out of that?”
After a while she answers, and I can’t tell whether she is speaking of now or then—perhaps both. “I was thinking of Earl.”
“But … you got away?”
“That’s a long story too.” And suddenly she grins at me, her quick, luminous smile. “Canada.”
6
Growing up in a Beer Bottle
Answer: Back then I used to drink lots, so that wasn’t much for me.
Question: That’s twenty-four beer?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Okay, and on this trip … would you have been drinking in the same fashion, about twenty-four beer a night?
Answer: Not really, ’cause I slow down when I have a hangover.
– Sharon (Minnie) Johnson,
North Battleford courtroom, 22 June 1995
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when Minnie and I got to the edge of Butte onto Interstate Fifteen. I was running from what I knew was a death threat by the Butte cops and Minnie said, “Fuck that, we’re outa here.” She’d just saved my life by proving to the cop-shop deskman that she was my older sister, she was eighteen and she’d be responsible for me, I was a silly kid and they should just let her take me home. The cop who’d hauled me in couldn’t push the deskman too far in framing me on a littering charge, and to prove how really concerned and responsible she was, Minnie slapped me down right there in the shop. She put on a good show.
“You stupid brat”—she grabbed me—“don’t you know any better?” And slapped me back and forth. She nearly knocked me out. I fell against her and whispered, “You don’t have to do it so hard!”
Minnie stung me, but she convinced them; she got me out of there and I was more than glad to follow her. And out of Butte altogether.
We were not well prepared—I had less than $90 from my CEP cheque—but we knew Mom was back in Winnipeg again. She’d found a job there cutting rags after working at a sawmill in Edson, Alberta, till she came to Montana for Grandpa Louie’s funeral, and Karen and Kathy were with her. I once started Grade Seven—maybe it was Grade Eight—in Winnipeg when Mom lived there before, so I thought if we headed through Havre and Chinook, going more east, we’d get to Manitoba quicker.
But Minnie said she wanted to go north through Sweetgrass, and I presumed it was to get into Canada as fast as possible. After what she’d done, I had to follow her. But a song by Burton Cummings was blaring on a car radio:
Runnin’ with a gun
And it isn’t any fun as a fugitive
God I wanna go home …
Home. I was “sixteen goin’ on seventeen,” as a real different song has it, and I’d been shipped back and forth across the border so often in six years, where was home? I guess it should be Butte, 410 South Jackson Street, but only Dad was left there—with little Perry for the time being—and trying to live the last year with Dad had been mostly worse than horrible. I couldn’t imagine the last three or four places where Mom had lived, I hadn’t seen them, and if my “home town” cops held me overnight I was as good as dead.
We caught a long night ride north through the Rocky Mountains to Helena, and so we made Great Falls by early morning: very good. The one suitcase we had was too heavy; we were already tired of lugging it. And I was thirsty, Minnie was dry, and she saw a Fast Gas on the Great Falls overpass and she groaned and pouted, “I bailed you out … you’d be hanging off a ceiling pipe by now, c’mon,” till I gave her money. And then she came back with nothing but a twenty-four flat of beer and a bag of chips. For the road, she said. I said, How do you hitchhike with open beer? She told me, Very carefully, so we had the bright idea to toss all except a few select clothes into the ditch. We were teenagers, half wiped-out for sleep, and nothing and nobody but wide-open Montana all around us. The beer made the suitcase a bit heavier than the clothes, but Minnie said she’d soon fix that, and we were headed north again for the Canadian border.
We walked past the highway exit east to Havre, but I asked her again: Shouldn’t we be going that way? No, Minnie wanted to see her boyfriend first; he lived outside Lethbridge, Alberta, and maybe he’d even drive us to Winnipeg himself, later.
“Anyways, you’re slim and young and pretty,” she said, relaxing. “These cowboys’ll stop quick for you anywhere.”
I sat on the suitcase and laughed at her; she was making herself comfortable in the ditch, wrapped in a blanket a guy gave us outside Helena, opening the next beer. We’d used this tactic earlier, and about sunrise a car had pulled over to pick me up, but when the driver saw I was Native and there was Minnie’s broad shape—“The Human Tank,” they called her in Butte—wrapped in a blanket rising from the ditch to come al
ong too, he just sprayed me with shoulder gravel, his door slamming shut as he took off. We were mad, but we laughed about that, how he looked when he leaned over and pushed the door open, saw us, and just stepped on it, outa there.
I told Minnie, “It was you, a big mistake coming wrapped up in that blanket, you scared him!”
“Ugh, me Big Mistake.” She laughed, pulling a Hollywood. She was about five foot two and maybe two hundred pounds, solid from logging in the mountains every summer. She began to powwow around in circles, “Me plenty big squaw, me happy Big Mistake!”
Overacting so badly I had to laugh too, and join her dancing. We played on the shoulder in the car lights coming down that straight flat stretch outside Helena, heading north for the next long line of hills. “Spinny Minnie” in our family—when we were little she was always Dad’s favourite, his pet; in the White House, when he came home from the mine before he wrecked his back, we girls would jump all over him, but Minnie would grab his lunch box and run. She always hid it in the closet, and he would have to go look for it, pretending he couldn’t find it, but when he found it he always had some goodies, candies or something, in there and he’d give them to her.
The heat burned up from the pavement outside Great Falls, and in full daylight Minnie found too many spiders in the shade of the overpass, so she wasn’t laughing much, even while sipping cool beer. I was very thirsty. I didn’t drink beer, so I said I’d go to a farmhouse I saw across a big field and get water. They were a nice old couple there; they gave me hot breakfast and a jug of water and biscuits for Minnie. Minnie always travelled easy; she’d drink and fall asleep when we got a ride, so I stood guard—“six-man” as it’s called in prison. I had a ball and chain of Earl’s, the only thing of his I had left, an eight-inch brass chain with a chrome-plated gearshift knob filled with lead, just right to hold in your hand or spin on the chain; the last link was shaped like a claw I could lock around my wrist and no one could get it off me. Minnie was talkative, lots of fun, but I wasn’t. She’d either ride in the middle or alone with the driver up front, but I always rode shotgun or in the back and watched and said nothing. We finally got a lift north of Great Falls in a truck with a guy picking up garbage at the highway rest-stops.
