Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  Minnie nudged me, pointed silently. The guy’s fingernails were painted and he was wearing red spike heels. Big brawny guy. I’d never seen anything like it. At the next rest area he got out, heels and all, and hauled out the garbage sacks and I said to Minnie, “Let’s go.” So we left him. The next pick-up Minnie rode up front and I sat low in the open back, leaving the Montana mountains behind in the cool, whistling air, the level prairies stretching east to the round pyramids of the Sweetgrass Hills. The guy dropped us off on the last rise, where we couldn’t be seen by the border guards.

  We walked past the U.S. Customs in Sweetgrass into Coutts, Alberta. Minnie did the talking; she told the Canadian guards we were going to Lethbridge just up the highway, and she had a Lethbridge address from when Mom once lived there. All I had for ID was my long-expired Grade Seven Butte school pass, which luckily didn’t show how badly I’d done, and they opened our suitcase and relieved us of the unopened cans but left us the empties—nice of them. Then they said, Okay you’re in, but a Customs guard escorted us to the bus depot. We hadn’t counted on that and Minnie had to buy two tickets to Lethbridge with money I gave her, and we checked our suitcase in. The guard finally left and Minnie went back to the agent and got a full ticket refund. She said we’d changed our mind, and nobody was arguing with her when she glared at them. They even rerouted our suitcase, so our few possessions and all the empty beer cans were on their way to Winnipeg while we snuck out over the next hill on the highway, out of sight from Canada Customs, and stuck out our thumbs again. Spinny Minnie, stupid me.

  I was worried. I had gotten away into Canada all right, but I was still under Montana probation, Judge Olsen’s order not to leave Silver Bow County because Frank Shurtliffe was being held for trial in the death of Douglas Barber and they wanted me to testify.

  “What’s so hot about Lethbridge anyways?” I asked Minnie again as we walked out of Coutts.

  “The Blood Reserve,” she finally told me. “It’s right next door.”

  More like fifty miles west as it turned out, but that made more sense than most of what we’d done so far. Mom’s sister, our beautiful aunt Rita, was always bragging she had this great boyfriend Doug on the Blood Reserve, but now Auntie Rita had taken over Minnie’s boyfriend state side, so the Blood Reserve made revenge sense all right.

  Late in the day a small man in a huge black Chrysler stopped. I was wiped out, but he was so kind I could relax. I drifted off, so I asked him if I could stretch out on his leather back seat and he said sure, that’s okay.

  Runnin’, runnin’ as a fugitive …

  The song rolling in my head and on his radio

  God I wanna go, wanna go home …

  Break it to them gently when you tell ’em

  That I won’t be comin’ home again …

  Lying safe in a decent man’s car, travelling, I finally had space for a few tears about what was happening to me. The only other car I had ever relaxed in was Mom’s big blue Caddy, sweeping down the road, all I could see was sky, feel it soaring through air, the whole family—as it seemed for that moment-happy. If Mom and Dad had stayed together, maybe she would still have had it. A hundred years ago Big Bear’s son, Little Bear, escaped from the Canadian prairies to hide in the mountains of Montana; I was born and raised all over those mountains; now I was running back to hide north of the border. My mother, my sisters, me—running, looking over our shoulders, hiding—Big Bear’s descendants, we had become nomads again; we were hunters hunting whatever we could find to stay ahead of hunger and homelessness. Still running from Whites.

  Only Leon was fixed in one place – set in his own violence and almost always in some jail. Never imprisoned, of course, like Big Bear for standing up for his people. The winter before, he’d got out of jail in Duluth, Minnesota—I think Mom even moved down from Winnipeg to live close to him—and he came back to Butte, bringing a girl named Laurie. One night he had me watch while he pulled at her pubic hair; he asked me if I had any hair there yet, and I just left. A little later he got rid of her, and now he was back in jail for running lights through Butte while drunk and then smashing a cop-car hood and windshield with his bare fists. Leon never did anything in his life for anyone but himself; he was too mixed up, or maybe too stupid, to even help himself without damaging himself too.

  The Elders say Indians today are masters of change: they have had to be or they’d be wiped out like the Beothuks. Be proud, we have survived! And yet here I was, a century after Big Bear, and I still cried for the freedom he fought for, and lost. Running from one country to the other.

  I lay in the back seat of the big black Chrysler and cried for myself, for Big Bear, the suffering and pain of Indian people. Driving west of Lethbridge around the huge fields bending down to the Oldman River of the Blood Reserve, and towards the mountains again. That good man was so concerned about Minnie and me not staying on the road at night that he drove out of his way to take us to Stand Off, the town on the rez. It had only nine or ten houses and a water tower, not anything Minnie wanted, and he risked ripping out the bottom of his beautiful car, driving right to the door of the house on the hills overlooking town. You could see the long front wall of the Rocky Mountains from there, especially Chief Mountain on the border in Montana, the sacred mountain of the Blood/Blackfoot people.

  The standing joke on that rez, the biggest in Canada, was that Blackfoot kill Crees; but Minnie and I survived—more or less. There was no one at the house when we pulled up, but in a minute two carloads of mostly young guys arrived and Minnie just got out and walked up to this huge man and started talking. I felt off-balance even being there, and I must have been a sight, a straight-out-of-Montana mixture of Native and cowboy and hippy, long black-brown hair with no bangs and parted to one side, worn blue jeans bell-bottomed enough to sit on my cowboy boots a size too big curled up at the toe, dark plaid man’s shirt two sizes too big with its tail hanging out, tall, slim, flat, no makeup. But I was strong, well tuned from years of logging, silent and on guard. No one could tell my young age from the way I carried myself. I was always thinking one step ahead of others’ actions so as not to be left behind, always serious, dark, and never started anything, then: I just followed in silence. If I went to the bathroom in a house, I’d feel the air out beforehand and be quick about it; in bars I watched the washroom door to see how many, or who, would be in there when I had to go; before I went I’d always tell Minnie. You have to know what you’re walking into.

  There was a long beer strike in Canada that summer; they could only get hard stuff or wine for parties. Everything was happening, night and day, and I drank steadily to keep up. I discovered again what a blackout was—it’d happened to me once before in Butte at the CEP party, and losing it like I did then and not knowing anything that happened terrified me—but I hadn’t dared ask anyone about it for fear they’d say I was just crazy, truly nuts. We were at Stand Off for weeks; a young guy named Beno became my boyfriend and initiated my drinking with stories about Bloods who slit the throats of every Cree they meet—it’s hereditary he said—sometimes even with skate-blades! Well, nobody was skating that hot summer. I stuck close to Minnie, and a couple of times we drove with them south to Montana and came back cross-country with a pick-up full of beer, but other than that it was all whisky and wine. Once Minnie went someplace and Doug wrapped his giant arms around me and tried to haul me into bed while Beno was outside, washing his bush of hair in a rain barrel. I yelled to him, but maybe he didn’t want to hear. As Doug and I wrestled on the bed, we heard a car: it was Minnie, back unexpectedly, and he jumped up and ran out. So nothing happened except Minnie and I made a deal she would not leave me alone again.

  I wandered around a few times and got lost, not knowing how to get back to Doug’s house—they told me prairie don’t come natural to Crees—so I stayed put in the little valley among the nine houses and water tower of Stand Off till Beno found me, laughing. He said they should put up a plaque: Yvonne Johnson, the only person in
history ever to get lost in Stand Off!

  Then suddenly Auntie Rita showed up, and before I could turn around Minnie had moved into my room with me. To “celebrate” the arrival, two carloads of us drove into Lethbridge. In the Bridge Hotel, Rita was all over Doug, Minnie over Beno, and I got disgusted—You guys are all frigging nuts—and I went out to sit in the car. Within a few minutes a stocky Native man came by, wearing a floppy-brimmed cowboy hat, and I asked him if he had a smoke. He said, no but he could get some at the liquor store, we could get them together. I knew Minnie and Rita wouldn’t be out till the hotel closed, so I went with him. He got a twenty-sixer but forgot the smokes, and as we walked back we started to test it and he told stories, sort of flirting. He said he was a real cowboy riding horses on ranches for a living, and he told me of all the crazy fights he’d had and the tough bulls he rode in the rodeo. After a while I couldn’t hear him too well. I just wanted to get back to the car because I never drank on the street—I hate the very idea of a “public drunk.” Then he wanted a cigarette. I wanted one too, badly, so he tried getting some cigarettes off the people walking by.

  All he got were looks of contempt. Even the passing smokers said they were on their last smokes. But then a guy at a bus stop shook out a pack and my friend went up to him; he told him No! and turned to the person beside him, “Useless drunk Indians, won’t work enough to get themselves smokes.”

  And he lit one, blew the smoke into the cowboy’s face. I could see where it was heading, so I walked away.

  “C’mon!” I said to him. “We don’t want nothing from this goof, forget it.”

  But he shook me off, “No way, that fucker insulted me,” and he hauled out his pocket knife, opened a blade not two inches long, and I wanted to laugh but it wasn’t funny: he went back and shoved it under the guy’s throat. Whew, I kept walking fast and in a second he had the whole pack. This was too seriously stupid for me. But he ran after me, grabbed me, yelling at me to run, and his unexpected pull rocked me off my feet, I was somehow falling around and as fast as that happened a cop grabbed me. Maybe they saw the whole silly show; needless to say, I missed the ride back to the rez.

  They charged me with being an accomplice in an “armed robbery with violence.”

  Cops are so slow—writing everything down, they never seem to understand anything. For a long time these Lethbridge police thought I was Minnie and eighteen. True, I was carrying her purse to keep my ball and chain safe, and for a while neither her ID which said she was five foot two and her picture which showed she had no neck on very broad shoulders, nor even the extra double-D bra they found in there could convince them I wasn’t her. Who’s this Sharon Johnson, they asked; my sister Minnie, I said. I’m Yvonne Johnson, this is my ID, I’m sixteen and my mom’s in Winnipeg, but me and Minnie are heading there and if you don’t let me go I’ll miss my ride. You’re not going anywhere now, they said, and what’s your mother’s name?

  “Cecilia Johnson … or maybe she uses Bear again.”

  “What’s her address in Winnipeg?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “So where’s this big sister, Sharon-Minnie or whatever?”

  I told them where I’d left her, but no cop will find Minnie once she knows they’re looking for her. I did persuade them to let me keep my protection ball and chain. They took me from jail to the juvenile detention centre on the hill overlooking the Oldman River valley and the Lethbridge railroad bridge across it like a long black line pointing straight to hell. When they shoved me into that little room and the door locked behind me with nothing but a small high bed and dresser both bolted to the floor, not even a washbasin, I exploded: I had to get out! and the big window was right there. I jerked a dresser drawer out and ran it against the window to smash it and jump. But I bounced off, the drawer splintered into pieces: unbreakable glass.

  The shock jolted me into some sense. I propped the broken drawer back in its place so it looked all right. It was the first time Canadian cops had talked to me, and here I was arrested. I didn’t know how to behave, so I just became as small as possible, go unnoticed. After about a week Aunt Rita showed up and said she would help get me out. But one thing she wanted to know: had Minnie been sleeping with Doug? I said I’d never seen it, ask her. Well, Minnie said she did and Doug said they didn’t, who should she believe? I wouldn’t say, so Auntie Rita disappeared. She helped me with nothing, nor did Minnie.

  The judge didn’t take long when my case came up about a week later. The legal-aid lawyer did all my talking. They had contacted Mom and she was sending cash for a one-way bus ticket to Winnipeg. The judge ordered that when the cash arrived I was to be escorted to the station and put on the bus. If he ever caught me in Lethbridge again he’d throw the whole charge at me.

  They placed me in a regular detention home filled with kids nobody wanted, lots of Natives of course. One was a little girl no older than six who had seen her parents die, a murder-suicide, kept there among all the older ones because no foster home would take her. We became friends; my nickname in there was Bigfoot, and she became my sidekick, Littlefoot. They held a summer carnival in Galt Gardens, and I rode with her on the Ferris wheel and we ate candyfloss.

  Littlefoot told me her terrifying dreams, how spirits came into her room every night. I discovered the “spirits” were people going there, but they wouldn’t let me sleep in her room; I was too old, they said, and stared at me as if I was a pervert when I asked. I noticed plenty, including how the male cook watched us sitting at the tables, eating—it was a very hot summer—at our bare arms and necks and legs. Once he grabbed me in the kitchen; we were wrestling and heading for rape when his girlfriend, a volunteer at the home, walked in and said, “This looks like fun,” and I got away. What could I do, or say? I locked myself in the music room and listened to Nazareth pound out “She’s Just a Broken-Down Angel.”

  This “girlfriend” came in almost every day to play with the kids. I thought she looked like one of those worn-out madams from a black-and-white movie. She’d sit flat-assed on the floor with her legs spread open and have the boys shoot marbles between them, and one day it got too much for me. I said to her, “How will these kids ever be normal if you have them shoot marbles up your snatch?”

  “That’s the point, darling,” she told me. “They have to learn to deal with it, that’s all. I never lose at marbles either.”

  Finally the money arrived and I was escorted out and put on the bus marked WINNIPEG. I arrived there twelve hours late—I got talking with a Native guy on the bus who had a cleft palate too (it’s not as common in men as women), and I missed a connection in Medicine Hat—but Mom and Karen were there to meet me. They worked in a rag-cutting place and lived in North Winnipeg, east of Main, on Selkirk. Skid-row Indian turf.

  Mom lived in Winnipeg so she could work, but the only place in Canada really important to her was her ancestral place, the small Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan, where our relations lived. They would never turn us away, always take us in to eat, sleep, get cleaned up, and rest and stay as long as you feel like it, there’s always room. Even hide you among all the bush and valleys if you felt you needed that. There our heritage was dug into the very ground, and there we never felt poor or displaced or useless freaks.

  Compared with Butte, Winnipeg was a huge city, with all the extremes of society from the very rich to the poorest possible, and right at the bottom was a thick layer of Indians. Off Main, in the seventies, you could live for weeks and not see a White except for an owner or a bartender or a cop. If you wanted to go Indian, Canada, and Winnipeg especially, was the place. I had no idea there were so many Indians in the world, whole bars full of nothing but Indians, especially the day the welfare cheques arrived. Karen was living with Gil, Kathy was living with Dan, both Natives, and Minnie was still somewhere in Alberta, and Perry with Dad in Butte. I stayed low, venturing out for no more than chips and gravy. The top song then was “Hot Summer in the City,” and it fit, I guess. I kne
w how to be quiet, become a shadow, quite still, cross my arms and legs and stare at one spot, shut my body down, but I also learned how to deal with two situations where I was vulnerable. One was when I walked alone: I learned to put on what I thought of as “the Johnson strut,” long, smooth strides, not running but gliding along really fast, I’d be gone before you knew it, a straight-ahead “don’t fuck with me” walk.

  The other situation was when I danced. I loved dancing, I’d become one with the music. In Canada women often danced with women, so it was simple to find a partner and I’d just disappear into that endless rhythm and movement. If no one jarred me I could dance all night. There were never any live bands or dance floors in the bars in Butte, but here there were many and they were one big reason I got addicted to skid-row Winnipeg.

  We Johnson sisters dancing together would clean up a dance floor: everyone sitting around, watching us. They were used to old, slow waltz-style stuff, but we shook them up with American Bandstand style; I personally liked Soul Train music. Then, when I turned seventeen, 4 October 1978, Mom decided we’d all go drinking together at the Savoy Hotel. She asked me to do the robot dance; I could do it perfectly—I’d had enough practice all my life!—head and arms and hair dangling slack, moving like a mindless, completely controlled, robot. Mom loved seeing me do that dance, so I danced for my mother. I was wearing all white, and Calvin (or Aaron—he used both names for welfare or unemployment-insurance scams) was at our table. Mom had once lived with him; he’d left, but now he’d showed up again, a romance for Mom that my presence in her home didn’t fit with very well. While I did the robot dance, Calvin started a bar fight.