Eden Robinson
Queen of the North
FROG SONG
Whenever I see abandoned buildings, I think of our old house in the village, a rickety shack by the swamp where the frogs used to live. It’s gone now. The council covered the whole area with rocks and gravel.
In my memory, the sun is setting and the frogs begin to sing. As the light shifts from yellow to orange to red, I walk down the path to the beach. The wind blows in from the channel, making the grass hiss and shiver around my legs. The tide is low and there’s a strong rotting smell from the beach. Tree stumps that have been washed down the channel from the logged areas loom ahead – black, twisted silhouettes against the darkening sky.
The seiner coming down the channel is the Queen of the North, pale yellow with blue trim, Uncle Josh’s boat. I wait on the beach. The water laps my ankles. The sound of the old diesel engine grows louder as the boat gets closer.
Usually I can will myself to move, but sometimes I’m frozen where I stand, waiting for the crew to come ashore.
The only thing my cousin Ronny didn’t own was a Barbie doll speedboat. She had the swimming pool; she had the Barbie-Goes-to-Paris carrying case, but she didn’t have the boat. There was one left in Northern Drugs, nestling between the puzzles and the stuffed Garfields, but it cost sixty bucks and we were broke. I knew Ronny was going to get it. She’d already saved twenty bucks out of her allowance. Anyway, she always got everything she wanted because she was an only child and both her parents worked at the aluminum smelter. Mom knew how much I wanted it, but she said it was a toss-up between school supplies and paying bills, or wasting our money on something I’d get sick of in a few weeks.
We had a small Christmas tree. I got socks and underwear and forced a cry of surprise when I opened the package. Uncle Josh came in just as Mom was carving the turkey. He pushed a big box in my direction.
“Go on,” Mom said, smiling. “It’s for you.”
Uncle Josh looked like a young Elvis. He had the soulful brown eyes and the thick black hair. He dressed his long, thin body in clothes with expensive labels – no Sears or Kmart for him. He smiled at me with his perfect pouty lips and bleached white teeth.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” Uncle Josh said.
I didn’t want it. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it. He put it down in front of me. Mom must have wrapped it. She was never good at wrapping presents. You’d think with two kids and a million Christmases behind her she’d know how to wrap a present.
“Come on, open it,” Mom said.
I unwrapped it slowly, my skin crawling. Yes, it was the Barbie Doll speedboat.
My mouth smiled. We all had dinner and I pulled the wishbone with my little sister, Alice. I got the bigger piece and made a wish. Uncle Josh kissed me. Alice sulked. Uncle Josh never got her anything, and later that afternoon she screamed about it. I put the boat in my closet and didn’t touch it for days.
Until Ronny came over to play. She was showing off her new set of Barbie-in-the-Ice-Capades clothes. Then I pulled out the speedboat and the look on her face was almost worth it.
My sister hated me for weeks. When I was off at soccer practise, Alice took the boat and threw it in the river. To this day, Alice doesn’t know how grateful I was.
There’s a dream I have sometimes. Ronny comes to visit. We go down the hallway to my room. She goes in first. I point to the closet and she eagerly opens the door. She thinks I’ve been lying, that I don’t really have a boat. She wants proof.
When she turns to me, she looks horrified, pale and shocked. I laugh, triumphant. I reach in and stop, seeing Uncle Josh’s head, arms, and legs squashed inside, severed from the rest of his body. My clothes are soaked dark red with his blood.
“Well, what do you know,” I say. “Wishes do come true.”
Me and five chug buddies are in the Tamitik arena, in the girls’ locker room under the bleachers. The hockey game is in the third period and the score is tied. The yells and shouting of the fans drown out the girl’s swearing. There are four of us against her. It doesn’t take long before she’s on the floor trying to crawl away. I want to say I’m not part of it, but that’s my foot hooking her ankle and tripping her while Ronny takes her down with a blow to the temple. She grunts. Her head makes a hollow sound when it bounces off the sink. The lights make us all look green. A cheer explodes from inside the arena. Our team has scored. The girl’s now curled up under the sink and I punch her and kick her and smash her face into the floor.
My cuz Ronny had great connections. She could get hold of almost any drug you wanted. This was during her biker chick phase, when she wore tight leather skirts, teeny-weeny tops, and many silver bracelets, rings, and studs. Her parents started coming down really hard on her then. I went over to her house to get high. It was okay to do it there, as long as we sprayed the living room with Lysol and opened the windows before her parents came home.
We toked up and decided to go back to my house to get some munchies. Ronny tagged along when I went up to my bedroom to get the bottle of Visine. There was an envelope on my dresser. Even before I opened it I knew it would be money. I knew who it was from.
I pulled the bills out. Ronny squealed.
“Holy sheep shit, how much is there?”
I spread the fifties out on the dresser. Two hundred and fifty dollars. I could get some flashy clothes or nice earrings with that money, if I could bring myself to touch it. Anything I bought would remind me of him.
“You want to have a party?” I said to Ronny.
“Are you serious?” she said, going bug-eyed.
I gave her the money and said make it happen. She asked who it came from, but she didn’t really care. She was already making phone calls.
That weekend we had a house party in town. The house belonged to one of Ronny’s biker buddies and was filled with people I knew by sight from school. As the night wore on, they came up and told me what a generous person I was. Yeah, that’s me, I thought, Saint Karaoke of Good Times.
I took Ronny aside when she was drunk enough. “Ronny, I got to tell you something.”
“What?” she said, blinking too fast, like she had something in her eye.
“You know where I got the money?”
She shook her head, lost her balance, blearily put her hand on my shoulder, and barfed out the window.
As I listened to her heave out her guts, I decided I didn’t want to tell her after all. What was the point? She had a big mouth, and anything I told her I might as well stand on a street corner and shout to the world. What I really wanted was to have a good time and forget about the money, and after beating everyone hands down at tequila shots, that’s exactly what I did.
“Moooo.” I copy the two aliens on Sesame Street mooing to a telephone. Me and Uncle Josh are watching television together. He smells faintly of the halibut he cooked for dinner. Uncle Josh undoes his pants. “Moo.” I keep my eyes on the TV and say nothing as he moves toward me. I’m not a baby like Alice, who runs to Mommy about everything. When it’s over he’ll have treats for me. It’s like when the dentist gives me extra suckers for not crying, not even when it really hurts.
I could have got my scorpion tattoo at The Body Hole, where my friends went. A perfectly groomed beautician would sit me in a black leather dentist’s chair and the tattoo artist would show me the tiny diagram on tracing paper. We’d choose the exact spot on my neck where the scorpion would go, just below the hairline where my hair comes to a point. Techno, maybe some funky remix of Abba, would blare through the speakers as he whirred the tattoo needle’s motor.
But Ronny had done her own tattoo, casually standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a short needle and permanent blue ink from a pen. She simply poked the needle in and out, added the ink, and that was that. No fuss, no muss.
So I asked her to do it for me. After all, I thought, if she could brand six marks of Satan on her own breast, she could certainly do my scorpion.
Ronny le
d me into the kitchen and cleared off a chair. I twisted my hair up into a bun and held it in place. She showed me the needle, then dropped it into a pot of boiling water. She was wearing a crop top and I could see her navel ring, glowing bright gold in the slanting light of the setting sun. She was prone to lifting her shirt in front of complete strangers and telling them she’d pierced herself.
Ronny emptied the water into the sink and lifted the needle in gloved hands. I bent my head and looked down at the floor as she traced the drawing on my skin.
The needle was hot. It hurt more than I expected, a deep ache, a throbbing. I breathed through my mouth. I fought not to cry. I concentrated fiercely on not crying in front of her, and when she finished I lay very still.
“See?” Ronny said. “Nothing to it, you big baby.”
When I opened my eyes and raised my head, she held one small mirror to my face and another behind me so I could see her work. I frowned at my reflection. The scorpion looked like a smear.
“It’ll look better when the swelling goes down,” she said, handing me the two mirrors.
As Ronny went to start the kettle for tea, she looked out the window over the sink. “Star light, star bright, first star—”
I glanced out the window. “That’s Venus.”
“Like you’d know the difference.”
I didn’t want to argue. The skin on the back of my neck ached like it was sunburned.
I am singing Janis Joplin songs, my arms wrapped around the karaoke machine. I fend people off with a stolen switchblade. No one can get near until some kid from school has the bright idea of giving me drinks until I pass out.
Someone else videotapes me so my one night as a rock star is recorded forever. She tries to send it to America’s Funniest Home Videos, but they reject it as unsuitable for family viewing. I remember nothing else about that night after I got my first hit of acid. My real name is Adelaine, but the next day a girl from school sees me coming and yells, “Hey, look, it’s Karaoke!”
The morning after my sixteenth birthday I woke up looking down into Jimmy Hill’s face. We were squashed together in the backseat of a car and I thought, God, I didn’t.
I crawled around and found my shirt and then spent the next half hour vomiting beside the car. I vaguely remembered the night before, leaving the party with Jimmy. I remembered being afraid of bears.
Jimmy stayed passed out in the backseat, naked except for his socks. We were somewhere up in the mountains, just off a logging road. The sky was misty and gray. As I stood up and stretched, the car headlights went out.
Dead battery. That’s just fucking perfect, I thought.
I checked the trunk and found an emergency kit. I got out one of those blankets that look like a large sheet of aluminum and wrapped it around myself. I searched the car until I found my jeans. I threw Jimmy’s shirt over him. His jeans were hanging off the car’s antenna. When I took them down, the antenna wouldn’t straighten up.
I sat in the front seat. I had just slept with Jimmy Hill. Christ, he was practically a Boy Scout. I saw his picture in the local newspaper all the time, with those medals for swimming. Other than that, I never really noticed him. We went to different parties.
About midmorning, the sun broke through the mist and streamed to the ground in fingers of light, just like in the movies when God is talking to someone. The sun hit my face and I closed my eyes.
I heard the seat shift and turned. Jimmy smiled at me and I knew why I’d slept with him. He leaned forward and we kissed. His lips were soft and the kiss was gentle. He put his hand on the back of my neck. “You’re beautiful.”
I thought it was just a line, the polite thing to say after a one-night stand, so I didn’t answer.
“Did you get any?” Jimmy said.
“What?” I said.
“Blueberries.” He grinned. “Don’t you remember?”
I stared at him.
His grin faded. “Do you remember anything?”
I shrugged.
“Well. We left the party, I dunno, around two, I guess. You said you wanted blueberries. We came out here—” He cleared his throat.
“Then we fucked, passed out, and now we’re stranded.” I finished the sentence. The sun was getting uncomfortable. I took off the emergency blanket. I had no idea what to say next. “Battery’s dead.”
He swore and leaned over me to try the ignition.
I got out of his way by stepping out of the car. Hastily he put his shirt on, not looking up at me. He had a nice chest, buff and tan. He blushed and I wondered if he had done this before.
“You cool with this?” I said.
He immediately became macho. “Yeah.”
I felt really shitty then. God, I thought, he’s going to be a bragger.
I went and sat on the hood. It was hot. I was thirsty and had a killer headache. Jimmy got out and sat beside me.
“You know where we are?” Jimmy said.
“Not a fucking clue.”
He looked at me and we both started laughing.
“You were navigating last night,” he said, nudging me.
“You always listen to pissed women?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking sheepish. “Well. You hungry?”
I shook my head. “Thirsty.”
Jimmy hopped off the car and came back with a warm Coke from under the driver’s seat. We drank it in silence.
“You in any rush to get back?” he asked.
We started laughing again and then went hunting for blueberries. Jimmy found a patch not far from the car and we picked the bushes clean. I’d forgotten how tart wild blueberries are. They’re smaller than store-bought berries, but their flavour is much more intense.
“My sister’s the wilderness freak,” Jimmy said. “She’d be able to get us out of this. Or at least she’d know where we are.”
We were perched on a log. “You gotta promise me something,” I said.
“What?”
“If I pop off before you, you aren’t going to eat me.”
“What?”
“I’m serious,” I said. “And I’m not eating any bugs.”
“If you don’t try them, you’ll never know what you’re missing.” Jimmy looked at the road. “You want to pick a direction?”
The thought of trekking down the dusty logging road in the wrong direction held no appeal to me. I must have made a face because Jimmy said, “Me neither.”
After the sun set, Jimmy made a fire in front of the car. We put the aluminum blanket under us and lay down. Jimmy pointed at the sky. “That’s the Big Dipper.”
“Ursa Major,” I said. “Mother of all bears. There’s Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia… ” I stopped.
“I didn’t know you liked astronomy.”
“It’s pretty nerdy.”
He kissed me. “Only if you think it is.” He put his arm around me and I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart. It was a nice way to fall asleep.
Jimmy shook me awake. “Car’s coming.” He pulled me to my feet. “It’s my sister.”
“Mmm.” Blurrily I focused on the road. I could hear birds and, in the distance, the rumble of an engine.
“My sister could find me in hell,” he said.
When they dropped me off at home, my mom went ballistic. “Where the hell were you?”
“Out.” I stopped at the door. I hadn’t expected her to be there when I came in.
Her chest was heaving. I thought she’d start yelling, but she said very calmly, “You’ve been gone for two days.”
You noticed? I didn’t say it. I felt ill and I didn’t want a fight. “Sorry. Should’ve called.”
I pushed past her, kicked off my shoes, and went upstairs.
Still wearing my smelly jeans and shirt, I lay down on the bed. Mom followed me to my room and shook my shoulder.
“Tell me where you’ve been.”
“At Ronny’s.”
“Don’t lie to me. What is wrong with you?”
God
. Just get lost. I wondered what she’d do if I came out and said what we both knew. Probably have a heart attack. Or call me a liar.
“You figure it out,” I said. “I’m going to sleep.” I expected her to give me a lecture or something, but she just left.
Sometimes, when friends were over, she’d point to Alice and say, “This is my good kid.” Then she’d point to me and say, “This is my rotten kid, nothing but trouble. She steals, she lies, she sleeps around. She’s just no damn good.”
Alice knocked on my door later.
“Fuck off,” I said.
“You’ve got a phone call.”
“Take a message. I’m sleeping.”
Alice opened the door and poked her head in. “You want me to tell Jimmy anything else?”
I scrambled down the hallway and grabbed the receiver. I took a couple of deep breaths so it wouldn’t sound like I’d rushed to the phone. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Jimmy said. “We just replaced the battery on the car. You want to go for a ride?”
“Aren’t you grounded?”
He laughed. “So?”
I thought he just wanted to get lucky again, and then I thought, What the hell, at least this time I’ll remember it.
“Pick me up in five minutes.”
I’m getting my ass kicked by two sisters. They’re really good. They hit solidly and back off quickly. I don’t even see them coming anymore. I get mad enough to kick out. By sheer luck, the kick connects. One of the sisters shrieks and goes down. She’s on the ground, her leg at an odd angle. The other one loses it and swings. The bouncer steps in and the crowd around us boos.
“My cousins’ll be at a biker party. You want to go?”
Jimmy looked at me like he wasn’t sure if I was serious.
“I’ll be good,” I said, crossing my heart then holding up my fingers in a scout salute.
“What fun would that be?” he said, revving the car’s engine.
I gave him directions. The car roared away from our house, skidding a bit. Jimmy didn’t say anything. I found it unnerving. He looked over at me, smiled, then turned back to face the road. I was used to yappy guys, but this was nice. I leaned my head back into the seat. The leather creaked.
The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama Page 25
