The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  Phoebe’s voice fills the small house as I walk through it, touching stuff, noticing all her special things crammed into every imaginable space, including her Red Rose Tea company figurine collectibles. Even if I can’t hear exactly what she’s saying, there’s the ebb and flow of her throaty laugh, the rumble of her imitating someone; there’s the timid murmur of Ferret answering a question.

  Phoebe’s bedroom smells like Vicks VapoRub and sweetgrass. Her dresser is cluttered with photographs, some new ones of people I don’t even know—like her life kept going after the accident. Right in the centre, though, there used to be a big, framed picture of them all: Phoebe and Aunt Sue front and centre, Aunt Tam, my mom, and even Jack Daniels. In Toronto, whenever I thought about my family, I’d remember this blown-up photo of them laughing together. But it’s not here. For some reason that makes me mad. I can almost remember holding the camera, my chubby kid fingers lining up the zoom box on the bunch of them, and clicking the button. Sometimes I just think I remember it because I’ve heard the story so many times—that I grabbed Tam’s camera and hollered while they horsed around on Phoebe’s front porch. “Nobody move a muscle!”

  Other than the photos and piles of loose change on the dresser, there are a bunch of pill bottles. I pick them up and shake them, but I don’t know what the long words mean, other than Oxycontin and the Perc family—Cet and Dan—which would be great for making quick cash on the street. Great for blanking out, for coping. I set the bottles back down. Phoebe’s got the diabetes. She’s got heartache, too, and no matter how many pills her young doctor gives her, they can’t cure that.

  Phoebe’s glasses are nowhere to be found. I walk back to the kitchen, check the ledge behind the old yellow curtains that hang in the window above the sink. There’s her same table with the three and a half chairs around it, the broken one being the thing that saved Aunt Sue from an enraged black bear that came up onto the front porch one spring, years ago. Auntie Sue, her lover, had moved in by then. My mom, Tam, and I were at our place next door having supper when we heard Sue scream. My mom came out with the rifle but never had to use it, since Phoebe was waving the kitchen chair in the muzzle of this huge animal up on its hind legs, roaring into Sue’s terrified face.

  “Ith Phoebe a thuperhero?” Phoebe exaggerates my little-kid high-octave voice.

  “Aaniin, I’m right here,” I call into the front room. “I can hear what you’re saying, you know.”

  Ferret giggles when I peek around the corner.

  “Shush, I’m telling my story,” Phoebe says. “Where’s my glasses?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh shit, they’re around my neck.” Phoebe pulls the silver chain she’s wearing and out from the neck of her T-shirt comes a pair of eyeglasses. “And so you see, Ferret, from the time Oreo was a wee toothless critter, she’s always known the truth—that I have magical powers and can talk to the bears. I said to that sonuvabitch, ‘You get the hell away from my woman! If anyone’s eating her tonight, it’s me!’”

  Ferret laughs for real, and so do I, even though I’ve heard that story a hundred times.

  “We’re Bear Clan. Oreo ever tell you that?”

  “Yes,” she says. “It’s on her tattoo.”

  “First thing I got inked when I was in Toronto. So I wouldn’t forget where I came from.” I stretch the neck of my T-shirt over my shoulder to show Phoebe.

  Phoebe puts on her glasses and blinks a few times while she adjusts to the prescription lenses. She shakes her cane toward me and says, “Oreo, Hon, that’s real nice. But you don’t need a tattoo to know who you are. That runs all through you, day and night, in your blood. No one can take it away from you, not if you don’t let them.”

  Phoebe leans forward and grunts as she puts her weight onto the cane and slowly stands up. She looks real tired. “I was gonna get out the big book, but that can wait.” She waves at a stack of phonebooks and newspapers in one corner, but I know she means our big book, the family album, which is probably on the bottom of that pile. If just thinking about one photo can mess me up, I can’t imagine flipping through a lifetime.

  “Make yourselves at home while I have a rest. Oreo, if you want to go next door, the key is in my cupboard like always.” Phoebe shuffles toward the kitchen. Eventually I hear the springs of her bed creak when she sits on the mattress.

  Ferret exhales loudly and slumps back onto the couch. “What should we do, Oreo?”

  But I’m already tapping on the keyboard, scrolling down the computer screen to check exactly what Phoebe posted. I delete her status update. No one has commented on it yet.

  Ferret rocks back and forth on the couch. Her breathing is shallow. She’s working up from serious anxiety toward a full-on panic attack. Not pretty.

  The thing about Ferret, she’s not hard—she’s tough enough, she’s got heart and she’s wily—but she’s got no meanness whatsoever. Ray-Ray even less. That boy is a Popsicle. So wasting that rapist, that psycho cop, it’s weighing heavy on them both.

  “Ferret, listen to me.”

  I wait for her to slow her breathing a bit and to stop rocking frenetically.

  “First, I want to find out who knows we’re here.” It wouldn’t take much. A do-gooder social worker, a kid with a grudge, even a friend who said something to the wrong person could fuck us up.

  “Who even knows where you’re from?”

  Digit, but he’s dead.

  “Cricket knows I’m Native, but he never remembers anything else. He says it’s too complicated.”

  “Ray-Ray actually listens to people.” Ferret exhales slowly.

  “Yeah, I’m not worried about Ray-Ray anymore. I even told him to come up here if he needs a place.”

  “What about the drop-in worker, Pamela?”

  I press my fists against my closed eyes. Pamela. I remember hearing her talk about coming to Wiky for the annual powwow. And how proud I was to tell her that I was from here, that my family came from these parts, and how she’d never forget that, seeing as she’d been here. “Shit.”

  “She’ll talk, all right.”

  My foot taps restlessly while I keep surfing. “I told Pamela I hadn’t been here in years and might never come back.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I thought I wouldn’t. Not ’til all that shit went down and you were gone. All I wanted was to bring you here so we could be safe.” My voice cracks.

  Ferret climbs onto my lap and kisses my ear, my throat. She squishes her face against mine. “We’ll never be safe, will we?”

  “Actually, we could never be safer, now that he’s dead.” My voice wavers. Ferret told me everything that happened, everything the King did. And what he was planning to do, if she hadn’t escaped. Every time I think about it, I choke back vomit. I have to breathe deeply and keep moving, so the hate doesn’t stop up my veins and cripple me forever.

  On the CBC website is a photo of the King, “a brave law officer, a hero gone missing.” Not dead, at least. Beside the article are the words, in a large bold font, Police Search for Persons of Interest. It’s a photo of Ferret and me in front of the Factory squat, our arms around each other, smiling defiantly into the camera.

  “Shit.” I bite my bottom lip.

  “Anyone with information is asked to contact police. Crime Stoppers offers up to $2,000 for anonymous tips leading to the capture and arrest of wanted criminals,” reads Ferret out loud. “That’s a lot of money.”

  Our friends, our neighbours, they all hate being poor. But luckily for us, I think they hate cops more.

  “Does that mean they don’t know what happened to him yet?” Ferret looks sick.

  We can’t tear our eyes away from that picture of the King. I hate his stupid face, his leering mouth, and his Elvis hair. I can smell the pomade, his boozy, tainted breath. I still feel his fists pounding me, his hands choking me, his belt buckle scraping my soft skin, the metal parts slapping onto the hard floor.

  “Oreo?”

/>   The room spins. Ferret shakes my shoulders gently. I open my eyes wide.

  “So they haven’t found any … parts yet.” Ferret looks wigged out.

  “Babe,” I say, trying to get my shit together. The last thing Ferret needs now is to have to take care of me. “They might never find out. So you got to figure out how to carry this thing. I wish it was me that did it; you have no idea how much. It wouldn’t wreck me the way it might you—if you let it.”

  In fact, sometimes all I can think about is how much I wish my hands had pulled the lever that severed his limbs and let him bleed out, that I had cut his dead body down from the slaughterhouse chains myself. Maybe then I would believe he was truly gone, and his bloated face would stop jumping out at me from shadows, like in some cheesy horror movie. Maybe then I could purge this poison from me, this thing that is shrinking me from the inside out.

  Ferret sits up taller. “You’re right. Maybe they never will find out the truth.” She clenches her jaw. “Lots of people knew what he was into. Think of all those women he trafficked. Anyone could have wanted revenge. Lots of people wanted him dead.”

  I nod.

  I scroll down slowly, so the picture of him gradually disappears. Ferret slumps against me when the last of him is gone. Hot tears roll down her face, trickle onto my skin. They run down my neck, into my T-shirt. Saliva pools in her mouth and drips out when she cries louder. Her shoulders shake. She gasps, and there is another sound, an ugly hacking sound. It is me crying, too, which is a total shock.

  “I’m s-sick from all the things he did to me,” I say. Sick of not owning my girl body, my boy body. Sick with his DNA all over me, inside me. “Nothing belongs to me anymore.”

  Ferret knows what I am trying to say. She smoothes my long hair, re-braids it, and pets my heaving shoulders. She says, “We are still alive, Oreo, you and me. That pig is dead, and he deserved it. And it almost was a different end to this story. So now we got to keep moving, we got to keep living, and make the most of it, whatever happens next.”

  I wipe my face and blow my nose.

  Ferret is pulling it together, but this is my land. I need to step up. An image of our summer camp comes to me, though I haven’t been there since I was a kid, foraging for berries and roots and edible plants, fishing in the cold lake, sleeping under the stars and in rough shelters.

  “Alright then, Ferret. We’re going bush side.”

  While Ferret showers and changes her clothes, I take Phoebe’s key and go next door. Just looking at the neglected house makes my chest burn, my breath come fast and shallow. Peeling paint hangs in strips; the porch screen has been ripped open by an animal. The wooden steps creak under my feet. The key fits in the lock, turns, but the door sticks. I heave my shoulder against it once, twice. It scrapes open, and the musty smell explodes. Curtains are drawn on every window. I step inside, right through an elaborate spider web hanging in the dark. Sorry, Grandmother.

  Bed sheets drape the furniture like Halloween ghosts. The front room feels damp; the rug is rotting. My mom’s bedroom is bare—stripped bed, dresser cleared, nothing on the walls. The drawers and closet are empty except for her bush jacket, her work gloves, and boots, which I put in my knapsack. The room I shared with the aunties is a trip—half closed down and half preserved like some teenage museum. Band posters are still plastered around the room near my old bed. It’s a punk shrine: Siouxie Sioux, Motörhead, Nina Hagen, Amebix. A couple of Sue’s childhood toys—a dolly, a plastic piggy bank—perch on top of the dresser. Her adult life had been next door with Phoebe, so who knows what happened to all those things? Tam’s stuff is packed in boxes, labelled with her name. Another stack of boxes glare at me, my name scrawled across them in black marker. Phoebe had to deal with that, alone.

  The kitchen is the hardest part. I shut my eyes, but can still see their faces, hear them laughing, shouting, gossiping. The missing framed photo smiles into me from the middle of the round table. A close-up of Phoebe and Aunt Sue, slim and brown and laughing, their arms around each other, their hair loose and beautiful. They look like teenagers, like me and Ferret, but were probably into their twenties. My mom and Aunt Tam are in the background, also laughing. Tam is holding Jack Daniels—he’s just a pup, his tongue lapping at her chin. They’re on Phoebe’s front porch, but the shot is crooked and the proportions are wonky; the big camera slipped in my hands and aimed at the sky above them, just higher than the porch roof. Looking at it now, the picture seems to have been a warning or some kind of prophecy. The focus is on the up and away, the sky, the place where spirits roam.

  I find the rest of the things I need in the pantry and hall closet: matches, hunting knife, compass, our old tent, a sleeping bag, a medium-sized pot and pan. There are dry soup mixes, cans of beans, an opener. Each thing I wipe and pack reminds me of something else we’ll need: rope, a small axe, duct tape. The Browning BPS Hunter is still there, all twenty-eight inches of its walnut finish, an extra loaded clip, and the gun-cleaning kit, too. I lift it and look down the sights. I aim out the back window at the nowhere road. I remember learning to shoot with my mom, the pull and release, the smell of a shot fired.

  This is all the stuff we’ll need while we wait it out into the fall. We’ll leave at dawn, the best time to start a new plan, a new life. Phoebe will know where we’re headed, no doubt about it. We have no place else to be and nowhere else to go. I figure we’ll be okay as long as I can remember all those things my mom and the aunties taught me. Time is different when you’re living with the land, different than in the city where you fight against it just to survive. Once we get there, we’ll be in no rush, Ferret and me. We’ll be in no rush at all.

  Kristyn Dunnion is a self-professed “Lady punk warrior” and the author of the novels Big Big Sky, Missing Matthew, and Mosh Pit (all Red Deer Press). She studied English Literature and Theatre at McGill University and earned a Masters Degree in English at the University of Guelph. She performs creeptastic art as Miss Kitty Galore, and is also the bass player for dykemetal heartthrobs, Heavy Filth. She lives in Toronto.

  Photograph by Jaimie Carlisle.