Hungry Ghosts

by Peggy Blair

  Yeung looked at her watch again. She opened her purse and removed a vial of squirming maggots.

  Yeung handed the vial to the medium, who gripped it in both hands. The medium motioned towards Inspector Ramirez and spoke rapidly in Chinese. Yeung shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. The exchange lasted for several minutes before the old woman finally nodded and put the vial down on the table, then stood up and bowed to Ramirez. Yeung opened her purse and placed several tourist pesos on the table. The old woman picked them up and folded the bills inside her sleeve. She bowed to Yeung and Ramirez a final time and scuttled into the shadows.

  “What did she say?” asked Ramirez.

  Yeung looked at him cautiously. “We talked about Zhuangzi. He was a Chinese philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he wasn’t sure if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly that dreamed it was Zhuangzi.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Yeung shrugged. “Taoists take the idea of opposites literally. Think of water. It is the opposite of hard. But it can break concrete.”

  “That’s what she said?”

  “It is not possible to translate exactly from Mandarin into English. The concepts are different between languages. But your investigation will be about opposites. Good and bad; hot and cold. You must be watchful for the sei gweilo.”

  “What is that?”

  “Literally? It means the ‘dead white ghost.’ That’s what the Chinese called the first white people they saw, because their skin was so pale. But it also means ‘foreign devil.’ Easily confused with sei chai lo.”

  “And what is a sei chai lo?”

  “A bad policeman.”

  “It is time,” said Dr. Yeung. She picked up the vial, pulled the stopper from the top, and emptied the glass tube into her palms, cupping her fingers together so that nothing spilled out.

  As she slowly opened her fingers, Inspector Ramirez recoiled, expecting to see white larvae writhing on her palms. Instead, a dozen or more iridescent green flies crawled up to her fingertips. One by one, they cleaned their wings delicately, elegantly. Then they flew towards the door, drawn to the outside lights.

  “Sheep blowflies. Lucilia cuprina,” said Yeung. She removed a calculator from her purse and began entering numbers. “Some larvae were still in the woman’s body when the dermestids moved in. They are beautiful, aren’t they? You should see them under the magnifying glass. Silver heads, purple legs, red eyes, green metallic backs. The female blowfly mates only once; she lays nine batches of eggs during her lifetime. Pre-oviposition ranges from three to thirty-five days. The mean generation time is nineteen days, sixteen hours.”

  She turned the calculator towards him so he could see the numbers. “Your victim died on February 14, between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m.”

  She returned the empty vial and the calculator to her purse. “What are you, Inspector Ramirez?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I tell you a hungry ghost will join us and you express no surprise. You don’t watch a bowl of rice, you watch an empty chair. The old woman asked me if you were mingbairen. I told her I think so.”

  “What is that?” asked Ramirez.

  “One who sees ghosts.”

  33

  Charlie Pike knocked on doors for several hours, but as Bill Wabigoon had warned, few band members wanted to talk to him about the murder. They were polite and invited him in, offered him cups of tea, asked him how things were in Ottawa, but changed the subject when he brought up the woman’s death. A few who recognized him from the old days were a little more forthcoming.

  “Yeah, come to think of it, I seen Freda Wabigoon’s truck at the side of the road that day when I was heading out for gas, after the plow went by,” Greg Keeshig said. “Hood was up, she had the pylons out. But Freda’s truck is always in the ditch. Her winter tires are practically worn through. She wasn’t in it, anyway. I left a message at the band council office for Bill to let him know. Saw her driving around later, so I wasn’t too worried.”

  Darlene Big George remembered driving by an elderly white woman walking along the gravel road just after the storm ended. She was going to stop and see if the woman was okay, but then a man in an SUV pulled over and picked her up. He made a U-turn and drove back to the highway. She thought they were the white people who lived around the corner, but she didn’t know their names. She’d never met them in person.

  That was typical, thought Pike. The people she’d seen probably didn’t know anyone from the reserve either. The two cultures might as well be living on different planets.

  Nothing else came up in his round of canvassing. He clambered back into his rented SUV and turned on the ignition. He sat, idly tapping his pen on his notebook while the vehicle warmed up, trying to decide what to do next.

  Sheldon Waubasking pulled beside Pike’s car and rolled down his window. Pike rolled his down too.

  “Want to come by for dinner?” Sheldon said. “Wife’s a good cook. Venison. Fish right out of the bay. Bet you don’t get that too often in Ottawa.”

  “Thanks,” Pike said, “but I should get going. I need to get introduced to the local OPP watch commander.”

  “Pete Bissonnette? He’s not a bad guy, once you get past all the swearing.”

  The OPP station was in White Harbour. It was a flat brown building located across from the liquor store. Pike parked his car in the almost empty parking lot. He walked inside, identified himself to the officer behind the counter, and asked for the sergeant in charge.

  “He’s on the phone,” the constable said. “He’ll be with you in a minute.”

  A burly man with reddened skin and short red hair sat behind a desk in the open part of the office. Pike couldn’t help but overhear.

  “Well, we’re really fucking busy. More Mohawks on the blockade. Crazy fuckers, coming here from fucking everywhere—Six Nations, Wahta, Oka, Cornwall, even New York. Who blockades a logging road in fucking minus-thirty weather? They’re going to kill somebody, all the fucking rifles they’ve probably smuggled in behind the barricade. And we can’t do fuck all about it until the company gets an injunction, which the local Crown says they may not be able to get, because the blockade’s in the middle of a fucking land claim. Yeah, I know. Well, they’ve got till Friday, and then the AG wants us to do something. Tell you what, though, if we have to move in, all hell’s going to break loose. Yeah, there’s media all over the fucking place.”

  He put down the phone, and the constable approached him, motioned to Pike, and whispered something Pike couldn’t hear.

  “So you’re Charlie Pike,” the sergeant said, as he walked from his office to the counter, his hand extended. “I’m Pete Bissonnette. O’Malley called me. Said to expect you. He’s a good man; known him for years. He didn’t tell me you were an Indian.”

  “My mother was Mohawk.” Pike didn’t mention his father or his connection to Manomin Bay.

  “Ah, fuck,” said Bissonnette. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I have a big mouth sometimes. What do you need, Pike?”

  “Call me Charlie. I know you’re monitoring traffic going up to the blockade. I’d like to see your daily logs for who drove on or off the Manomin Bay reserve between 4:00 p.m. on March first and 8:00 a.m. on the second. I’m going to want to run some motor vehicle and criminal record checks on anything that looks interesting.”

  Bissonnette reached below the counter and pulled out a logbook.

  “Yeah, we’re keeping an eye on things. At least trying to. The Quebec police never did that at Oka. Made it a fucking nightmare later on, trying to figure out how many people were inside the community centre when the army went in. We need to control this blockade, Pike, I mean Charlie. No violence. No Dudley Georges. Those are instructions straight from the AG.”

  He flipped through the lined pages and ran a nicotine-
stained finger down the entries for the first and second of March. “All right. There was nothing moving on the 562 on March first until the plows went through. Then, starting at 1712 hours, there was a whole caravan of trucks and buses filled with . . . fuck, sorry . . . filled with Mohawk Warriors. My men stopped them. Found some rifles, shotguns; nothing registered. They seized the weapons and issued a few firearms charges, but let them go through.”

  “Did you run the plates?”

  Bissonnette reached beneath the counter for a sheaf of papers. “I’m not a complete fucking idiot.” He grinned and handed them to Pike. “Here, take a look. We can make copies of anything you need. Are you planning on going up there yourself?”

  “Right after I leave here. I’d appreciate it if you let your men know I’m coming. I’m not armed. I’d rather not get shot, if things start to go south.”

  “You want to take a shotgun with you?”

  Pike shook his head. “Then someone would shoot me for sure.”

  Charlie Pike scanned through the entries. A beige truck left the reserve at 1623 hours, Ontario plate 209LDA, registered owner William Wabigoon. That was 4:23 p.m. The same vehicle returned thirty-two minutes later. Must have been Freda’s truck, Pike thought. The one Greg Keeshig saw broken down at the side of the road.

  Pete Bissonnette had already pulled a copy of Bill Wabigoon’s record off CPIC. A couple of common assaults. Nothing for more than ten years.

  Nineteen other vans, trucks, and SUVs had been observed heading up to the blockade. Three of the registered owners had records, including everything from traffic violations to possession of drugs and firearms offences.

  Sheldon Waubasking’s bylaw truck had gone back and forth to the blockade twice. But Sheldon had no adult criminal record, only his youth convictions, and that record was sealed: O’Malley had made sure of that.

  Nothing else stood out. The OPP hadn’t checked any of the tires or tire widths on the vehicles that passed them. They were looking for armed protesters, not the Highway Strangler. They had no idea at the time that a woman had been murdered and left in the woods.

  “Thanks,” Pike said to Bissonnette. He looked out the window. The sun was low in the sky. “I think maybe I’ll head up to the blockade now.”

  “Yeah, well, keep your fucking head down. It’s a full moon tonight.”

  34

  The air was thick with grey exhaust from dozens of idling police cars, media vans, trucks, and SUVs, as well as clouds of soot and ash. Oil cans burned with refuse and pine branches. A couple of blue portable toilets stood at the side of the road. Four Ojibway men sat around a large hide drum with a cloth skirt and elaborately beaded tabs, pounding it with their drumsticks.

  Pike parked the SUV and walked the gauntlet of OPP officers, his hands open wide, showing them he was unarmed. He approached the one who appeared to be in charge.

  “Did Sergeant Bissonnette call you to say I was coming?” He reached for his wallet with his police ID. “Just getting my badge out. I’m Charlie Pike. Rideau Regional Police. Ottawa.”

  “Yeah,” the man said. He looked at the ID and handed Pike back his wallet. “He said it’s okay to let you behind the lines. What’s an Ottawa detective doing up here? Is it that murder on the reserve?”

  Pike nodded. “Some of the people back there may know something. Might have seen something on their way here.”

  “Go ahead. But anything happens to you, it’s not our responsibility, understand? You’re on your own.”

  “Don’t worry,” Pike said and grinned. “I’ll blame the feds.”

  The protestors had constructed a sweat lodge a few hundred yards back of the two overturned school buses. A bear skull sat on top of a two-by-four stuck in the ground. A small pile of offerings rested at its base—tobacco, sweetgrass, sage. A fire burned behind a barrier of plastic garbage cans set up to keep people from falling in the flames after they left the sweat.

  Pike walked over to the firekeeper—the man tending the fire—and introduced himself.

  “Where you from, Charlie?” the man said. “I knew a Henry Pike a long time ago. His Indian name was Assinack, same as his father.”

  “Manomin Bay. Henry Pike was my grandfather.”

  “He drowned, didn’t he? He was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “You go on in,” the firekeeper said. “I’ll look after your jacket and your shoes for you. You can strip down when you get inside. It’s going to get real hot in there.” He put another rock in the fire. The rocks were already red-hot, turning to grey ash.

  The sweat lodges that Pike remembered from his youth had been covered with deer hide and moose skins. This one was made with canvas, plastic tarps, and carpet remnants. Pike was careful to approach the opening from the left. Eyeglasses, watches, and rings rested in a tin can outside the door. Pike removed the beaded cuff and dropped it in the can.

  Once he entered, Pike moved around clockwise until he found an empty space and seated himself cross-legged against the tent wall. Another man, an elder, then sat beside Pike. He was Midewiwin, Pike guessed, from the medicine bag he placed at his feet, a small deerskin pouch holding traditional medicines. The Midewiwin were healers, members of a secretive medicine society. He called to the firekeeper to close the flap.

  Inside, it was pitch black. There was complete silence except for the sound of men breathing shallowly as they took off their socks and shirts. Then the elder spoke.

  “If it gets too uncomfortable for you and you need to go, just call out ‘all my relations’ before you leave. We’ll begin with a prayer once the stones are hot enough. But first, we’ll have a smudge.”

  All my relations. The old phrase affirmed the equality of peoples. Pike recalled one of the old man’s lessons: “Everyone, and everything, is connected.” But for years Pike had felt disconnected. He sat back on his tailbone, thinking about his family. His dead father and mother, his mishomis. The little brother he hadn’t seen for years. The elderly auntie he’d barely summoned the courage to visit.

  The elder lit a braid of sweetgrass in a clamshell. He made his way around the circle clockwise, crawling on his knees as he moved in front of each man. He swept the smoke towards Pike with an eagle feather. Pike waved the sweet smoke over his chest, his face, cleansing himself, purifying his thoughts. The elder moved slowly, smudging each man until he returned to his original position.

  The only light came from the tip of the burning grass. It could have been minutes or hours that passed before the elder called for the firekeeper to bring in the hot stones.

  The firekeeper opened the flap and carried in the red-hot rocks with a shovel. When he was done and the flap was closed again, the rocks glowed red like the end of a campfire in the deep of a summer night. The cleansing smell of cedar boughs was soon replaced with the pungent scent of men.

  “So now we’ll begin. We’ll dedicate our prayers tonight to the Grandfathers, and pray to the Sky Father,” said the elder. “To honour the four directions, we’ll have four rounds tonight. The fourth is going to be the hardest. It always is.”

  Grandfathers was what the Anishnabe called rocks. The bones of Mother Earth. His grandfather’s bones. Pike felt tears prick his eyes at the thought of his mishomis being pulled down in the water, his bones resting like stones at the bottom of Manomin Bay.

  The elder threw cedar water on the firepit with a dipper and the sweat lodge filled with steam. He picked up a small hand drum and thumped it methodically, calling out to the spirits in Ojibway.

  “Thank you for making this world,” he said. “Thank you for the air and the water, the animals, the plants. Make us strong enough to lead our children out of the darkness, to heal our bodies and our minds.”

  But in Pike’s ears, it wasn’t the elder who spoke, it was the old man. Pike recognized his voice, the soft lisp of missing teeth. “You’ll need cour
age, son. Courage to find out where you belong, courage to see the truth. White, red, yellow, black—in the womb of Mother Earth, we’re all equal.”

  The elder spoke again in his own voice. “We’re going to go around the circle, so you can tell the Creator your clan and why you’re here, so the spirits can guide you.”

  A talking stick was passed from hand to hand. No one interrupted another man’s story. The familiar voice to Pike’s right surprised him. He hadn’t seen Sheldon come in. Pike leaned forward slightly, listening attentively.

  “I’m Bear Clan. I’m here because I feel guilty. A white woman was murdered in our territory.” Sheldon hesitated. “I don’t know the right thing to do, if I should talk about it or not.”

  The elder splashed water on the rocks; the steam hissed. “We honour the Bear Clan tonight because it’s a full moon,” he said. “The Bear Moon is the time when we can see beyond the curtain and share our deepest thoughts. You don’t have to say anything out loud if you don’t want to; the Creator will hear you. That goes for everyone.”

  The talking stick made its way around the circle. Pike was the last man to hold it. “I’m here because of an old man,” he said. “He’s the only man alive who still calls me son, and he’s dying. I guess I’m afraid of losing him too.”

  Pike recalled the old man’s last story, the burden he’d transferred to Pike when he gave him the beaded cuff, the weight he’d carried too long. The old man had already told Pike that he was sexually abused by a visiting priest at residential school when he was nine, the same day his little brother drowned. But this time, he’d provided details.

  “You know, it’s been sixty years, and I can still smell his breath. I knew it was wrong, but I was scared. If you didn’t do what they told you, you’d get the strap. I felt as low as a snake after that. The only thing that made me feel better was alcohol and sometimes women, but the women never stayed, and the bottles were always empty the next morning.