The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  “—only got a ten-minute break, you know—”

  I hurl myself against the door, sending the man backward onto the floor.

  “What the—?”

  I’m on top of him, smashing the board over his bald head. The rusty nail scrapes angry lines across his red face. I pound that broken board into his face until it sticks. The man screams. The nail has sunk in, it’s in his face somewhere near his eye, and he bats at it blindly. Blood comes out. My stomach heaves. He pulls at his black shirt uselessly. It says Fillies on the pocket. He rolls partway onto his stomach and sends me flying off him with jabs of his hard knees. His shirt says Security in big white letters on the back. I have no strength left, am gulping for air, every bit of me throbs in pain, I have no weapon. The big man crawls away from me, wood still hanging from his bloody face. His broad shoulders heave with each grunt. He holds the board in place with one hand and uses the other to get to his feet. He staggers toward the open door. I lurch to my feet. I push as hard as I can, and the big bald man falls down, down the stairs, crashing and bellowing. There’s a terrible thud when he lands. The white letters on the back of his shirt glow from the darkness of the cellar floor. He’s dead quiet. I slam the door and take the keys, still hanging from the lock. I slide the bolt over. My shaking hands put the keys in my apron pocket.

  What have I done?

  My eyes dart around the space, my brain tries to make sense of it. It’s well lit but not very clean. There’s a stool with a crossword puzzle folded on top. A paper plate with a piece of pizza on the table beside it. I stuff that into my apron, greasy napkin and all. Music pounds from the other side of a solid door.

  Fillies. A strip club. Any second someone could come barrelling through and find me. There are two more doors at the other end; one is plain black, the other a metal door marked with an exit sign. I push that one open.

  I’m outside. It’s nighttime. The air is warm and there is a breeze. It’s a half-empty lot; there’s a car and a shiny motorcycle parked out back. Further back is a large dumpster. Beyond that is an alleyway. I don’t see anybody. I shut the door behind me, creep alongside the car and make a run for the dumpster. I crouch beside it. My breath comes ragged, shallow. All those sore ribs bang away at my insides, making it hard to think. The longer I stay put, the more I notice the dumpster’s stink, garbage stewing in the summer heat. Scattered at my feet are chip bags, broken vials, used condoms. Just down the alley, maybe a few feet away, cars drive past. They honk and squeal tires and blare music. Their engines rev, voices spill from them, laughing, hooting. The city is still here, pulsing its beat of regular nighttime madness, existing all this time without me.

  I hear the grinding gears of a city bus, hear the ding of its door opening, the churning motor when it stands at the curb letting people on, letting people off. My chariot awaits. And I know right where I’m going. Where else but back to the Factory squat? Back to the hot stink of the slaughterhouse, the itch of the grassy field, the rotting dump: home.

  Come and get me, Pig. I double dare you.

  Ferret Hunt: A Three-Act Play

  Act One: Safe House

  Cricket waves goodbye to the sleazebag landlord and shuts the door to our very own filthy, east-end rooming house. I can hardly breathe. The place stinks of dead mice and piss-soaked old men. He opens the reeking bar fridge on the other side of the small room, slams it shut. There’s an electric hotplate on top. In a closet with a broken door is a leaky toilet and rusting sink. Cricket paid one hundred dollars cash for a week—money his parents gave him to buy textbooks for next semester, which starts in a few days.

  Cricket pulls a cobweb from the tip of his blue mohawk. “Ew. We have our safe house, now we just need to find our girl.”

  “Great.” My voice cracks. Lately I’m either raging or weeping, sometimes both at the same time. I lean out the dirty window ledge so he won’t notice my eyes getting wet. I dab gently with a corner of my shirt. First, my face is still sore from the King’s beat-down, and second, I don’t want to smear the mascara and eye shadow Cricket piled on earlier, using samples at the mall. “I just can’t believe no one’s seen her,” I say for the hundredth time. “It’s been over a week since the raid.”

  A hot breeze gusts in, bringing shouts and traffic sounds from Gerrard Street below. Bollywood music erupts from the downstairs restaurant when customers open the front door. I smell deep fryer and curry. My stomach gurgles. I slump onto the cracked linoleum floor with my back to the wall.

  “Don’t worry, Oreo, you’ll be great as an undercover stripper. Pretend you’re on a rerun episode of Charlie’s Angels.” Cricket squeezes my shoulder. His body heat closes in on me in the stuffy room. “Soon we’ll all be together again.”

  Except for Digit. I stare at Cricket until he looks away. The unsaid words hang heavy in the gloom.

  I jiggle the CD player we found in the trash. I want to crush it between my strong hands, destroy it, burn this rage out of me so I can snap back to my old useful self.

  All we know is while we were getting our asses ridden at 14 Division, Ferret somehow escaped from the Factory squat party raid and eventually hid out with Ray-Ray. Ray-Ray and Darcy say cops picked her up a couple days later. Not just any cops—the King himself was hunting her. He knew her real name and everything. By the time they let me out of bail court, Ferret was long gone. Her name didn’t turn up anywhere in the system when the drop-in worker started digging.

  “We should tell Ray-Ray and Darcy where we are. Ferret might hook up with them again. What do you think, Oreo? I mean, where else would she go?”

  “I don’t know. Drop-in is off limits, shelters too.” We heard the King’s harassing all the kids downtown, even more than usual. “She doesn’t have family.”

  “Seriously. Ray-Ray’s our best bet.”

  But I wonder. How far will I go to save Ferret? All the way, whatever it takes. “With Eddie in jail, maybe Ray-Ray’s ratting. He’d do anything to help his boyfriend. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Hmmph,” says Cricket. “I’d do anything to spring myself, since I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Well, you already did that.” I blow into the CD player’s dusty parts.

  “Pure luck,” he says, smiling.

  Pure rich white luck, I think.

  “I can’t wait to see you in drag, Oreo.” Cricket unzips his backpack and dumps everything onto the floor. He sorts it all: the makeup, lingerie, and hooker shoes we shoplifted from Gerrard Square mall. A bottle of vodka stolen from his mother. He empties his pockets—a handful of change, an unopened condom, the clean square card with his dad’s big-time lawyer name on it.

  “On second thought, you keep this.” He hands the card to me. “I know the number. If anything goes down again, just remember to say, ‘Officer, am I free to go?’ And, ‘I would like to call my lawyer.’”

  Like it’s a game with different rules for each player.

  “That judge owed your dad some kind of favour, huh?”

  Cricket blushes. “The pigs, too. I’m lucky the charges got reduced. Trespassing and drinking in public? Please, that’s nothing.”

  Cricket’s older, so he didn’t get the extra $125 for being underage.

  He says, “I pay a fine and do some community service, whatever. I wonder if volunteering with my revolutionary arts collective counts.”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, if I go to jail, it better be for political reasons, not for getting down at a house party.”

  I laugh. “Honey, you’ll never do hard time. You’ll be out on bail eating take-out and watching America’s Next Top Model before you can zip those prison pants.”

  Meanwhile Eddie and boys like him—mixed-race, tattooed, buck-toothed boys raised by the system—they rot on remand. That stokes the angry fire that burns inside me.

  “Whatever, girlfriend.” Cricket waves his hand at me. “You didn’t do too bad either, Oreo. Possession of one joint? Please.”

  “I got beat
up. My face is still a mess. I already had a record, so now I’m on probation.” I shake my head. “It’s bullshit.”

  “Still, could’ve been way worse.”

  “The squat is shut down permanently, all our stuff is destroyed. My girlfriend got kidnapped by a psycho cop, and Digit is—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “—and Eddie’s in jail. Does it need to get worse?” I bang my head on the window sill once, twice.

  “Take it easy, Oreo.” He looks worried.

  Okay. I breathe deeply. Don’t want to completely lose it.

  “You know, getting arrested was not fun in my condition—the Ecstasy-Viagra combo, euphoric with a rock-hard dick for hours. Awkward! I would have totally gotten laid by my bike courier if we hadn’t got busted.” He sighs loudly. “And I had to toss my amazing stash. It was selling like hotcakes.”

  “Wish I had my tools here,” I say. Making something, fixing something, anything at all, would make me feel better. Large and in charge.

  “Maybe I would’ve got a boyfriend in jail,” he says wistfully.

  A sudden memory from the party slams into my brain. I was spinning, headphones on, didn’t hear the cops, the yelling. I was zoned. Then I looked up to see Ferret’s terrified face, right as that cop’s stick cracked my head. I remember coming to as he dragged me outside. The King threw me against his car to cuff me; my knees buckled. Then, with the bracelets on nice and tight, he sucker-punched me in the face. “Squaw dyke,” he said in that sinister low voice. I lay on the ground outside the Factory in all that chaos, blood dripping out of my nose, him leering above me, light bouncing off his silver belt buckle.

  Cricket waves a hand in front of my face. “Should we talk about Digit now?”

  “No.” I jump up and pace back and forth from the window to the fridge. I still can’t believe he got shot. Who brings a gun to a vegan dance party?

  “Couldn’t even say goodbye with all those cops parked in front of his hospital room. Ray-Ray heard his folks came all the way from New Brunswick. He was hooked up to machines.” He sniffs loudly.

  When I picture Digit leaving the hospital, it’s on the back of some leather daddy’s motorcycle. It’s on his mud-covered ATV, or a skateboard he made out of found objects, not in a wheelchair. Not in a wooden box.

  I swear and punch the stained wall.

  “Easy, Oreo.”

  One night this summer, me and Digit and Ferret were lying in the field outside the Factory, shooting the shit about where we grew up. I told them about Manitoulin Island, where I’m from, Wikwemikong unceded territory. I wanted to take Ferret home. Wanted her to meet Phoebe, my Auntie’s woman who helped raise me. I wanted to take her to the powwow. So she could see that part of me that’s always getting watered down around white people. She could hear the drums and singers, smudge with burning sage, and watch the dancers in their beautiful regalia; Hoop Dancing, Men’s Fancy, Iron Man and Iron Woman. She could start to know those proud parts of me, who I really am.

  Digit wanted to come, too. “Some tings remind me of Neguac, my village,” he said. “We catch oysters dere, you know. Each day, every day. I’m supposed to stay wit da oysters and find some girl who’s not my cousin to make babies.” Digit’s accent got thicker the longer he talked about home. He loved it as much as he hated it: ripping around on four-wheelers, chucking dirt bombs at the école criss, tabarnak, sneaking beers from his drunk uncle’s broken barn fridge. Lighting blue angels to impress a girl. “Hi burn my hass so bad, you know, but still she don’t like me. She go out wit my friend hinstead!” Ferret and I shrieked when he re-enacted it, dropping his pants and lighting a fart as it reverberated from his bare backside. Digit.

  Cricket wipes at his eyes with a pair of pink panties from the pile of things. He’s blabbing still, going on about Digit.

  “We can’t do anything for Digit. Let’s find Ferret.” My knuckles are warm from denting the drywall. “I wish none of this ever happened.”

  “Yeah,” says Cricket. “That party was a stupid idea.”

  “Fuck you.” The party was my idea for Ferret’s birthday, and I’m the one who talked her into having it. “I didn’t invite all those university bitches. I didn’t post it on Facebook. How do you think the cops found out?”

  He clears his throat. “I’m not the enemy, Oreo.”

  “You sure?” I feel mean. I imagine ripping his throat wide open with my bare hands. “You came out of this pretty clean.”

  Cricket says, “Do you want me here or not? I should leave. If my parents find out I’m not at Frosh week they’ll cut me off. I can’t afford tuition. Maybe that doesn’t matter to you. But I’d be completely on my own.”

  Like the rest of us have been for years. “Boo fucking hoo.”

  Cricket’s mouth pops open, but he doesn’t argue.

  I spin away from him. I march over and yank the window as high as it’ll go.

  “This place is a dump.” Cricket is making nervous small talk.

  I say, “It’s so un-bougie. I thought you’d love it.”

  “Very funny. There’s a difference between un-bougie and downright ugly. Speaking of which, are you ready to get in drag?”

  I grunt. “I don’t know about this plan.” I kick off my boots, drop my combat pants, ripped T-shirt, boxers, and dirty socks into a pile. I sniff my pits—they are pretty ripe. I try to wash them in the crap sink with a sliver of dried old soap. I let them dry by the window. The breeze feels good on my bare skin. I shove on the push-up bra with its stiff little hooks, the lace panties, the strange belt with the tiny snaps. It takes a while to get everything in the right place. Finally, I roll the matching stockings over my strong legs. I struggle with the metal clips dangling from the belt. “This is harder than it looks.”

  “I’ll help with the garters.” Cricket kneels at my feet. He looks up—the bra is working, I can tell by the shock on his face. “You know, Oreo, if I was even remotely bisexual …”

  “Ugh.” I stuff my fishnetted feet into second-hand stilettos. I stumble. “Ugh. How am I supposed to dance if I can’t even walk?”

  Cricket presses his hand on my back lightly. “Shoulders back. Spread your feet wider. You have to find your new centre of balance.”

  I lurch forward. My left foot slides and I wipe out, land right on my lace-covered ass. “Shit. I can pop the panel from an ignition tumbler and hotwire a car in three minutes, but I can’t cross the room in a pair of heels.”

  “I’d be there in a heartbeat if they’d hire me. Sadly, this patriarchal establishment does not pimp my gender.” He stares at me down on the floor and says, “Hmmm.”

  “What?”

  He pours two glasses of vodka. “I’m thinking.”

  I say, “I wish you could come with me.” And suddenly I do. I mean it just as much as I wished him away earlier.

  “Honey, I’d blow your cover like nine inches at the bathhouse. Here, drink.”

  I take a swig, cough. “Do you really think Ferret’s at this peeler bar?”

  He sits on top of the bar fridge and the hot plate. They creak a warning. “I hope so. I mean I do and I don’t. Ray-Ray saw the King take her. He did something with her, took her somewhere, and it’s not the detention centre.”

  My stomach twists at the thought. I know what can happen to homeless girls, working girls, Native girls. All over the country our betrayed bodies get swallowed by lakes, by the ocean, and sometimes spat back up on the sand, some dog walker or early-morning jogger finding our parts.

  “Darcy heard she might be in the upper lounge at the strip club. I guess it pays to have shady roommates after all, huh? Darcy says that’s where the King dumps all his fresh meat for the international buyers. Dopes them up, whores them out.”

  My mouth waters with sick. What would be worse—death or forced prostitution?

  “Sorry,” he says. “I know this is hard.”

  “I still don’t get why he’d do that to Ferret. She never hurt anyone. Why would h
e even bother?”

  “Maybe because he can.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s a schizoid power tripper. She’s an orphan, a street punk. Queer. Who the hell is going to stop him?”

  “I’ll kill that fucking pig myself.” I’m grinding my teeth, squeezing my fists. I want to destroy something, kick the shit out of somebody, anything to let loose this rage. I wonder why it’s not me who’s missing in action, a statistic waiting to happen. I didn’t protect her. My girlfriend is gone, and it’s my fault. I want to howl, want to rip out my hair and beat my chest.

  “Chill, Oreo.”

  “How would you feel if it was your lover?” Heat rises in my cheeks. I remember the sound of the King’s voice, the things he said to me that day on the sidewalk. Things he’s probably doing to Ferret.

  “She’s my friend, too.” Cricket looks hurt, but that fuels me. “I wish you’d let me talk to my dad. He might know someone …”

  “Your dad might get favours at the cop shop or in court. Tell him to help Eddie. But Ferret doesn’t need a lawyer. She needs a bounty hunter. Does your dad have a gun?”

  Cricket’s eyes widen.

  “I’m serious. I don’t want to fuck with the King and run. He’ll find us. He pulls strings all over, nobody knows how far. He runs this town. If I’m facing off, I’m taking him right out.” Panic rises in my chest.

  “Don’t joke, Oreo.”

  “Who’s joking? Nobody else is gonna help. Nobody else gives a shit about us.” My voice shakes. I’m yelling, and Cricket shrinks into himself. He moves farther away from me. I want to scream, you sheltered little bitch. I want to hit him, slap some meanness out of me and some sense into him.

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen to her either,” he says quietly.

  “Bad shit has been happening our whole lives,” I yell. “The squat wasn’t just a cool hangout. It was her home. We’re her family. We have to do something!”

  I picture Ferret hurt, scared, feeling like I do, but all alone. My girl. I choke back a sob that has been lodged inside, ever since the party raid. When I find her, I’ll take her north. Get out of this ugly city for good. I lean out the open window, take deep breaths. Stuff is happening outside—families going for dinner, couples holding hands—and none of it matters. I tell myself that Ferret is still alive.