He jerked forward and spilled coffee down his chin.
“I want some.”
He jumped up, spilled coffee on his pants and leaned over me breathing his milky coffee breath in my face. “Sweetie,” he said. His eyes were like two small cups of espresso about to overflow.
He kissed me and started to shake.
“Jesse?”
“Yeah?” he sniffed.
“I know it now.”
He lifted his head from my shoulder and looked at my face. “Know what?”
I can fly.
whale song in riverain park
KISS. WE MEET IN THE FIELD BETWEEN RIGHT AND WRONG. pull blanket overhead. laugh in this world we create. shouldered hills, knee mountains, backboned plains, rib-caged valleys. land of filtered sunlight. cocooned like two children sharing a secret. touch me here. kiss me there. lips and fingertips. right here. he smells of musk and cedar smoke. i sniff the air in the hollow of his collarbone. he blazes wet trails down my sternum. we shapeshift. a snake swallowing its own tail. O. oh, yes, he says. O. oh, yes. yes. yes, i say. this world is blue. it churns and rolls. i stretch myself over him. back against chest. his arms, my waist encircle. he licks my ear. i giggle, elbow him. he tickles the back of my knee. i roll over. nose to nose. hey mister. he looks at me with wide eyes. now you’ve done it, i growl. he flashes me a sheepish pout. i’ve been a naughty boy. he winks at me. no, i want to tell him, you’re beautiful, a beautiful, beautiful boy. instead, i place hands on either side of his face. i’m gonna kiss you till you’re a mound of quivering jellyfish at my feet. your lips will get numb first, he says. wanna bet? sure, he laughs, either way, i win.
we walk hand in hand through the park. come here, he says, i want to show you something. i’ve already seen it, i joke. i told you, i say pretending to placate him, it’s big. ha ha, he says pushing against my shoulder with his. okay, okay, it’s really big. biggest ever. that’s true. he puffs up his chest. whales look at you with envy, i say. who can blame them? he says, look who’s beside me. i smile. sweet talker. girl, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, he says, pulling me towards a small circle of evergreens and birch in the middle of the park. he ducks and holds branches aside. i walk into the midst. a blue blanket is spread out in the centre. he sits down reaching his hand up for mine. i told you already, i tease, it’s really big. it’s so big it makes the cn tower feel inadequate. get down here silly, he says pulling me towards him. he lays on his back, and i do likewise. temples touching we stare upwards. do you see them? he asks. and then, i do. three red tobacco ties in the highest branches. how did you…? there’s one for you, one for me, and one for us. i stare at them one by one. say a prayer for each.
after a while, i roll over hugging his midriff. listen to the drumming. hey, he says, get on your own side. how about you get on my side? i’m always on your side baby. ah, my hero, i say putting a hand to my heart dramatically. whatever, he says, nudging and pushing at me playfully, now get off me. get off you? i never thought i’d hear you say that. oh, you must have me confused with some other guy, he jokes. now, you’re gonna get it, i say, sitting on his chest. about time, he says. i pin his wrists with my hands. i’m gonna lick your whole face for that one, beluga boy. oh yeah, you and what army? he says, narrowing his eyes. oh, you want a bunch of soldier boys licking your face? the more the merrier is my motto, he says. dreamer! a man is nothing without his dreams, he says. i am about to ask him which fortune cookie he stole that from but decide licking him would be the better response. i lean down. he wiggles like a fish in a net. in the ensuing melee i, somehow, lick his eyeball. for a moment our eyes are full moons. we collapse into laughter. a gull screeches. ever sick! he says. i was aiming for your cheek. yeah, right—in that case, remind me never to go hunting with you. but you moved! you would too if you had that tongue coming right at you, he says. hah, i’d think it was the tastiest thing i’d ever seen. geez, i hope you flossed and listerined, he says blinking. yeah, i say, the human mouth is teeming with bacteria. great—i’ll probably be the first person ever to get gingivitis—in his eye! have fun explaining that to your doctor, you pervert, i say, laughing. but i was framed! we both know you’re the kinky one. well then, i say, while we’re here… i unbutton his jeans. hey, he says, someone might see us. we’ll get under the blanket, i say, tugging at his pant leg. they might hear us. we’ll be quiet. what if… he says, pulling the blanket out from beneath us.
oh, shut up and kiss me.
he’s right. my lips are numb, but i can’t stop myself. not until i have kissed every inch of his body. i kiss his outer thigh and work my way to his ankle, his foot, his toes and up the inside of his calf, his knee, his thigh. the higher i go, the harder he gets. i move slowly. we hear a man and woman talking. their voices get louder. the louder they get, the more he squirms, the slower i go. he clenches and unclenches the blanket in his fists. soon voices fade into the distance. i move slowly upwards. so, so slowly. blowing softly on the small hairs at the top of the inside of his thigh. he places a hand on the back of my head barely resisting the urge to guide me. i move higher, letting a few strands of my hair brush across his shaft. with one swift motion he pulls me up and rolls onto me, pushing his hips into mine. i ache for him. you make me so wet. how wet? as the ocean. he hangs over me, a blue whale rising from the depths, then bends to kiss my forehead. hey, i tease him, someone might… sshhh… he says, raising one hand to his mouth and placing a finger over his smile. i wrap my legs around his back, run my hands along his spine. he dives into the ocean. waves roll across my belly.
right now, he whispers to me, whales are crying with envy.
Chloe
THE PEOPLE HUNCH IN CORNERS, IN DIRT-STREAKED JEANS that are a little too big or a lot too tight, old baseball caps—trucker caps before they were worn by celebrities, stained Starter caps of losing teams—and scuffed-up shoes, their dull fish eyes peering into the night. Alistair slows the car; I hear the intake of breath between his teeth, low and slow. He raises his hand, points his finger like a gun, pretends to shoot them one by one. I know his stomach is a huge, hard knot. The small car fills with the stench of their misery and his howling despair. I roll down the window slightly just to feel the air blow the hair at my temples.
“No,” I say.
“But it’s so fucking awful.” He nearly chokes on the words. “I know.”
“They’d be better off than living… like this.” He angrily waves his arm at them, at the street, at the dirt and decay and squalor.
“C’mon,” I say. “You don’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah?” he says, his voice rising. “And how will it end? Choking on their own vomit in some rat-infested alley? Beaten and left to die? Frozen on some roadside? Or picked up by some freak who does whatever the hell he wants….”
I hang my head. It’s true—we don’t know how much worse it may get for any one of them.
“But you can’t know what joys they have in their lives. Who loves them. Or where they’re headed. This may be just a stop on the way to some other life in some other place. It may be the rock bottom they have to hit before they turn their lives around. It may lead to joy. Or freedom. Or… maybe redemption.”
He sighs.
His knuckles clench the steering wheel. He presses a little harder on the gas. I close my eyes, for a moment I dream of girls laughing in sunlight. Feel the night air flowing across my temples. Think of my friend Josie rubbing my temples the night she stopped by for a drink and saw my jaw was frozen by a cold concrete rage that set the muscles tighter and tighter until I could barely move and was blinded by the bright white of pain. I’d lost the baby months before but some nights I’d find myself frozen like that, like some grotesque statue, sitting for hours in the darkness, my head pounding, too angry to move. Afterwards, I’d be scared by the way it consumed and immobilized me and would burn cedar to clear the anger from the room. That night, Josie rubbed my temples, massaged my face, held my hand in hers, and slowly, slowly chipped away
the concrete until it all came crumbling down and I cried myself to sleep. When I woke she was sitting quietly with my head in her lap, stroking the hair on my forehead as if I were a child waking from a nightmare. I knew that she had helped me break through that something, whatever it was, that had such a hold on me. I knew that anger would never again hold me in its tight grip.
As we drive, I try to count the people we see so that when I get home I can smudge and say a prayer for them. Often there are too many to count. Sometimes I count only the ones with the shopping carts. Or only the ones sitting down. Or only the ones sleeping or passed out.
Under his breath I hear Alistair swearing. He’s thinking of his sister. There’s nothing I can say to him. None of the stock words of comfort. We both know it’s not okay. That it’ll never be okay. That she won’t be coming home. Won’t be found. And if by some bizarre twist of fate she ever does return it’ll be in pieces even if she’s still breathing. The dying won’t stop. The killing won’t stop. The neglect won’t stop. The losses will continue to pile up. No good will ever come of it. We’ll never know if he could have saved her. Somehow. If there was some bit of magic that could have kept her safe. The what-ifs are acid. They burn, wound, and fester. We scratch at them. Bandage them. But they are always there. Eating away at him and, sometimes, like some sort of contagion, eating away at me too.
I want to kiss his mouth, long and deep. Not because it’ll ease his mind but because for a moment I want us both to remember that there is love and tenderness even in this stinking cesspool at the pit of this writhing city.
The street lights flash by. Down every alley I see people dragging their legs, stumbling into doorways, arms strewn over each other’s shoulders or raised in fists, mouths yelling, others slumped against each other, sitting on the curb in pairs, or standing in small groups, hands jammed in pockets, eyes darting, watching, always watching, backs to the wall, or passed out on sidewalks, in doorways, covered in thin blankets, lean Boxer and German Shepherd mixes with studded collars and grease-stained handkerchiefs tied around their necks standing beside them complacently as if they too have lost hope of anything different, can’t remember a full meal, and haven’t the energy to run or fight or do anything other than stay by the sides of these stick men and women while the days and nights pass in a blur of sameness.
Alistair’s sister was only 12 when she left that house on the rez, swearing she would never go back. “Let me go with you,” he begged her as she gathered her few belongings into a hand-me-down knapsack. “Please, Chloe. Please. I wanna go too.”
She refused. “No,” she’d told him. “You’re a boy, he won’t hurt you the way he hurts me. You’ll be okay.”
“But you’ll be all alone,” he said, staring at his feet. “I could look after you,” he said and stretched himself to look as tall as he could.
“Ali,” she said tousling his hair, “sometimes it’s better to be alone.”
Looking back he wondered how she could have been so selfless, so strong, at such a young age.
“Anyways, if we both go they’ll come looking for us and we’ll be easy to find. By myself I can disappear.”
She couldn’t have known how true those words were. He wished he’d known then what it meant. Stopped her before she began erasing herself. Their mother’s boyfriend started it and he knew in every fibre of his being that some other man with a windigo soul finished it.
Disappeared.
He pulls the Civic over suddenly. Slams it into park and jumps out before it fully stops. Stomps towards the sidewalk. I jump out not knowing what I am about to face but ready to stand by him through whatever might come.
Sometimes he thinks maybe, just maybe, he’s spotted her. He’ll stare into the face of a haggard-looking prostitute while she halfheartedly lists her skills and the prices. “More if it includes her,” she’ll say nodding her head at me. Some of them notice the intensity in his eyes and back away from him, ready to bolt or to fight. Worse are the ones who grow limp at the sight, striking a pose of utter submission.
“He’s looking for his sister,” I’ll tell them so they won’t be frightened. I want to tell them that his eyes burned like that even when he was a small boy.
“I’m sorry,” he’ll say. “I thought you might….” Sometimes after talking to them he’ll hand them a twenty or, because so many of the women on that street are Native, a tobacco tie. Most take it. I wonder what they do with them. If maybe one day we’ll drive down this street and see tobacco ties hanging from every tree branch and door handle. The women gone, their prayers, at last, answered.
Other times he jumps out of the car and slams his fist into the nearest fence, light pole, or door. He kicks over trash bins or runs until he collapses.
I hold him then, wishing I could somehow pull the sadness and anger from his body.
“I should’ve gone with her,” he’ll cry sometimes.
“You were just a boy,” I say, holding him on those nights he weeps. “If you had, you’d both be gone. She didn’t want that. She had enough without the burden of taking you down with her. She wanted you to be free. Please, Al, give her that much.”
“I know.” Sometimes his body would go limp as he let the anger seep out. Sometimes, instead, the rage would surface. He’d howl. “I should’ve fucken killed him. I should’ve beaten that prick 10 times for each time he put his dirty paws on her.”
“You didn’t need to, his guilt got him. Ate away at him. It wasn’t cancer, it was guilt.”
“I hope he suffered, the disgusting maggot,” he said this time, spitting the words out. “I hope it hurt like hell.”
“Alistair,” I say. “Don’t.”
“He died all nicely drugged up, in a hospital room with flowers and my mom holding his hand. Holding his filthy hand. While Chloe…oh, god…god…”
I close my eyes. Inhale deeply.
“…and all alone…”
I feel him shudder imagining what might’ve happened to her. His beautiful sister with her long limbs and easy grace.
We never speak of Pickton. The first time a story about it came on the news, Alistair threw up on himself. For days he holed up in his apartment, refusing to see or talk to anyone. When I finally convinced him to let me in, I was shocked. He was thinner and pale. He obviously hadn’t slept or eaten in days. There were holes punched in every wall. His phone was ripped out of the wall and in pieces. The TV was also in pieces, either kicked in or smashed with a chair.
He stood at the door glaring at me. With a look that said ‘I know you won’t be able to handle this rage, this whirlwind of grief.’ Daring me to enter.
I stepped across the threshold, pulled him to me, and held his chest against mine. His muscles were tensed and rigid. His arms plastered to his sides as if they were all that were holding him together. I held on. He took a sudden deep breath, put his head on my shoulder, burrowed into my neck, and cried for his sister, for all of the missing women, for their brothers, their families, their friends, their communities, and finally, for himself.
Later we silently cleaned his apartment. Patched the holes in the walls, threw out the TV and broken furniture, packed his suitcase, and went to my house. He never went back. Not even to get the rest of his things. He had brought everything that mattered to him that first night. Everything else I sold or gave away before returning the key to the landlord.
I’d known Chloe my whole life. I grew up in the city but spent summers with my grandparents back home on the rez. She was almost three years older and I rarely saw her but something about her made me look for her every time we went swimming down by the docks and every time we went to the store for penny candy.
Mom and Dad wouldn’t let Roxy and me go near their house.
“You girls stay away from the Jackson place,” they’d say.
“Okay.”
“We mean it.”
“Okay, okay. Sheesh,” we’d say.
“And don’t ever go in even if they invite you. J
ust tell them you have to come home.”
“But why?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Just because. Promise.”
“Okay, okay, we promise.”
We were dying to know why we couldn’t ever go inside their house. It looked pretty much like every other house on the rez. Not as nice as Nokomis and Mishomis’ place but not as bad as some. “What happens in there?” we asked each other. Late at night, when we were supposed to be sleeping we’d chatter in the dark. Make up elaborate stories of the kind that only a seven and eight year old could invent.
Babies buried in the backyard.
Naked ladies with pouty lips posing on the couch like we’d once seen on the cover of a Playboy magazine poorly hidden under one of our older cousin’s beds.
Frankenstein-type experiments in the basement.
Rats as big as dogs.
It was the not knowing that scared us most. But we knew Chloe and liked her. There was something sweet and vulnerable in her even though she was faster and stronger than most of the boys and could spend hours swimming on the rare days she wasn’t called home right away. She’d dive and splash, laughing and shaking her hair. She was tall and lean, with long sandy brown hair and hazel eyes that sparkled like sunlight hitting a crest of waves. Her little brother, Alistair, was stockier and thoughtful with a mop of curly black hair and black eyes that were fired with an intensity uncommon in such a young boy. He never strayed far from his sister and no matter what he was doing I noticed that he’d look for her every few minutes. If she was smiling, he’d smile then return to what he was doing. If anyone approached her or she looked at all sad or like she needed help, he was immediately by her side. We figured that maybe he did this because, for someone so graceful and fluid in the water, she was really clumsy. At least, she always told us she was clumsy when we asked about the bruises.
The Stone Collection Page 10
