From the Ashes

by Jesse Thistle

  When we got to the front desk to pay, Grandma turned to me.

  “Grandma Clara King, my grandmother you met last year that’s over one hundred. Her grandpa was a chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company up on Lake Timiskaming during the fur trade one hundred and fifty years ago. He ran that fort. Our family built this country, Jesse.”

  The teller scanned the goods, and the total of $374.87 popped up on the register. My heart jumped. Grandma opened her ancient purse and handed over her credit card.

  “That’s why we shop at the Bay. Tradition is important—remember that.”

  Grandpa was running the van just by the store entrance. He had “El Paso” by Marty Robbins blasting on the radio when we got in, exhaust fumes flooding around us as we buckled in. Grandma promptly blazed up a Du Maurier and sucked in a massive drag. I coughed, waving my hand in front of my face, but I took in what smoke I could—I needed a cigarette myself. Grandpa leaned over into Grandma’s cloud of death, peeking inside the bags.

  “What you got there, little lady?” he asked.

  “Never you mind, Cyril!” Grandma snapped. She snatched up the receipt, pushing his hairy paws aside, and folding it into the wad of other receipts in her purse. He let out a loud yelp, and they both laughed. “The boy looks like a million bucks.”

  TROUBLEMAKER

  AFTER WORD GOT OUT THAT I had a steady job at the grocery store, my stature at school elevated further.

  I had my own cash to buy pizza and cigarettes at a store across the street during lunch, and soon I made friends with older kids at my school and other high schools across the area. I continued to hang with my local street buddies—Brian, Derick, Leeroy—but my new friends drank and slept with younger girls and went to all the best parties. Some weren’t in school at all. They had their own apartments, cars, and jobs. We formed a gang. We called ourselves the Bud Boys because Budweiser was our beer and we put Bud beer caps on our baseball hats. The caps helped identify who was who when we brawled at parties or in school parking lots.

  By the middle of Grade 10, my grades were plummeting. I was scrapping by with 50s and 60s and still couldn’t read or write very well. Math was the only grade I was keeping steady, but even that began to sink after I started skipping class all the time.

  I was branded a brash troublemaker by school authorities after the stereo in the drama classroom was lifted in a break-in one Friday night. Leeroy’s long arms didn’t have any trouble reaching the window into the classroom. I climbed him like a ladder and tossed out the audio equipment. We took it to a Vietnamese kid who was waiting in a townhouse nearby. His cousin bought it for $200. Leeroy and I got $100, and we split that. I was questioned by the police, teacher, and principal, but they didn’t have enough evidence to lay any charges.

  The authorities threatened to expel me if things didn’t turn around, but I didn’t give a shit. Grandpa didn’t seem interested in me anymore. Sure, he drove me to work here and there, at six a.m. on my weekend shifts, but I expected him to punch me out when he found out about the stereo, and he didn’t.

  “You’re just like your dad,” he said instead.

  One lunch period near the end of the school year, I wandered over to the Chinese market on the other side of the parking lot where they kept the school buses during the day. I noticed a group of kids out back huddled behind a dumpster, so I decided to check it out.

  Balpreet was there—a tough Sikh kid we called Ballpeen because he hit like a ball-peen hammer. I’d known him since Grade 3. He stood in the middle of everyone holding a bottle full of smoke with a backward cigarette sticking out of the bottom. He called me over, and everyone shifted to make room for me.

  “Indian,” Balpreet said. “You ever smoke hash before?” He held the bottle up in my direction.

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  I looked closer and saw a little brown stone cooking on the end of the cigarette in the bottle. Smoke circled round and round within it and left a cream-coloured stain on the clear plastic side. I thought of Irish coffee.

  Balpreet uncorked the lid, pulled the cigarette out, then thrust the bottle full of smoke in my face. “Suck and hold,” he said. A wisp of smoke floated up under the bill of his Blue Jays hat. It smelled like burnt earth.

  I put the open nozzle to my mouth and sucked as directed. The smoke shot into my lungs.

  Raunchy.

  I almost coughed it out, but held it for about a minute until my ribs convulsed and I dropped my cigarette, then I spewed a plume of grey air up into the clouds—it was too thin to call it smoke. Still no coughing. A feeling of euphoria hit me, and I wobbled and leaned on the dumpster.

  Balpreet said something in Punjabi and laughed. I noticed there was a line of tiny hash balls strewn out on the edge of the dumpster. He cracked a sideways smile and dabbed his cigarette on the next toke then slid it in the bottle. He reminded me of Clint Eastwood after he gunned someone down. I broke out in laughter.

  That was my first encounter with drugs.

  The next week I was buying a gram of hash from a friend behind the pizza place across from the school when squad cars rolled up. My friend, who had a leg in a cast, crushed the dope on the ground with the end of his crutch and it stuck to the bottom of the rubber tip. The cops searched everywhere—on the roof, in the garbage cans, in our mouths—but couldn’t figure out what we’d done with the drugs.

  “We know you have some,” one cop yelled. “We saw the transaction.”

  We emerged with only a warning, and my reputation solidified. Older kids, and not just the ones I already hung out with, began showing me respect.

  A few months later I was selling acid by the sheet and sniffing speed in the washroom before class every day.

  THE STRONGEST BROTHER

  JERRY MADE A CHOKER OUT of chicken bones and coloured wooden beads. He was a creative guy and drew things like dragons and elves and played Dungeons & Dragons with his nerd friends at his new high school, an arts school way out in the country. For as long as I could remember, too, he’d been proud of being what he called “Native” and found creative ways to express it. I made fun of him and his friends, but I secretly played D&D with them and always had a blast. They were genuine in a way that my cool friends weren’t.

  “Look,” he said with a big smile. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  The bone necklace was kind of alright. I thought it made him look strong and proud.

  “It’s last night’s dinner,” I said, deadpan.

  “Why do you always do that, Jesse? Why do you shit on our heritage like that?”

  I knew he was being sincere. He remembered more of Saskatchewan than I did, and had recently gone on a school trip near Regina and learned stuff about our mother’s people and started making pipes out of soapstone, burning herbs, and wearing beads out in public. He started lifting weights after that, taking care of his health, and I even heard a drum bump ever so softly in his room sometimes. He said he was singing Indian songs. I didn’t care. I stole the tobacco he got out west, not concerned about what ceremonial “Indian” uses he had for it.

  Heritage be damned, I just wanted a smoke. I looked at him and the necklace.

  “Because it looks awful. Why do you and Josh play Indians? Fuck, we’re from Brampton and never practiced that stuff. It’s embarrassing.”

  Jerry quietly asked me to leave his bedroom and shut the door as I left. I heard his drum that night, and the next day he wore his choker to school.

  I was jealous of Josh when we were little, and I was jealous of Jerry now.

  CHOICE

  MR. T.’S MUG HAD A blue police emblem on it. He took a sip and placed it on his kitchen table and asked me if I wanted Earl Grey or orange pekoe.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I answered. I wondered why he’d called me over to his house for a chat. He’d never done that before—phoned my grandparents’ house and asked me over. I thought maybe Brian was sick. Or worse, that Mr. T. had heard at police headquarters some of the stuff I
’d been involved with lately, him being the deputy chief of a police division and all.

  He plopped a bag of pekoe in my cup, poured in some boiling water, and then gave it to me. The bag drifted around, releasing a stain that was more brown than orange. He took a seat across from me and slid a stoneware container of sugar my way.

  I helped myself.

  “Jesse,” he began. “I know you’re a good kid.”

  I added another lump to my tea and thought, Here we go. I had a hard time not rolling my eyes.

  “Since the time you stole our robins’ eggs, I knew you had it rough—orphan, no mom and dad.” He took a sip and continued: “I grew up without a father; my mother did it all on her own.” He pulled a leather photo album that was older than dirt from the counter next to him and opened it. “See here? That’s me.” He pointed to a picture of a guy around my age doing a layup shot. The picture was black and white, and in it he was clean-cut, thin, and athletic, with hairy legs. The socks and shorts he was wearing were both too high to be fashionable. There were other basketball pictures and a photo of him and a woman he said was his mother outside an old tenement building. She had on a long trench coat, and he told me how she used it to smuggle him into their building as a child because single mothers were looked down upon back then.

  “I found basketball and the force,” he said and closed the album. “It saved my life.”

  I poured a bit of milk into my cup and the tea churned in a grey tornado.

  “My poor mother,” he went on. “She just couldn’t show me how to be a man.”

  I was uneasy hearing Mr. T. speak this way. It was the most any adult had spoken to me in months. I started to respond, but he lifted both hands slightly off the table and said, “Just listen, please,” and then planted his elbows down in front of him.

  I gave my teacup a turn. I wasn’t ready for a lecture.

  Brian lit my cigarette with his Zippo and asked me to watch for ashes because they could burn the upholstery of his new car, a used Renault his parents got him for his seventeenth birthday.

  “I have something cool to show you,” he said as he pulled into the parking lot of the local park. He turned his headlights off, hopped out, and grabbed some beers from the trunk. I got out, and we both sat on a bench.

  “See here?” Brian held out one hand. His fingers peeled back to reveal his silver Zippo.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “And in this hand”—he held up his other hand—“I have the car keys. I want you to pick.”

  I reached for the beers and yanked one off the rings. “I want one of these. Fuck your lighter and keys.” I laughed and pulled the tab and it hissed open. I took a swig and belched.

  “No, serious, bro. Pick. It’s a lesson I learned at Landmark.”

  Landmark was a series of empowerment workshops his uncle had gotten him for Christmas the year before. After he’d attended a few sessions, Brian would spout off about how we had to face ourselves, how we had to live our best lives, and how truth was subjective because everyone’s truth is true or some shit like that. None of us really paid attention to it.

  “Easy, Socrates,” I said. “Can’t we just drink without all your philosophy bullshit?” I really hoped my comment would diffuse his little life lesson, but he persisted.

  “Pick—lighter or keys. There is only one right answer.”

  “If I must. Keys.”

  “Why? Explain why.”

  “What the fuck you mean, explain?”

  “Tell me why you chose that over the lighter.”

  “I don’t know. Because I can drive away in it.” I took another swig, the beer fizzing in my throat.

  “Wrong!” he yelled, sounding like a game-show host. “Pick again.”

  I was confused but gave it another go.

  “Okay, I pick the lighter this time.”

  “Explain why.” Brian flicked the Zippo and twirled it around his knuckles like a leprechaun twirling a gold coin. I snatched it from him.

  “Because you said the keys were wrong and I need the light for this blunt.” I pulled out the joint I had in my pack of smokes and lit it with the Zippo. I took a big toke, thinking I had the right answer this time.

  “No. Wrong again.”

  “Fuck this game, yo.” I took another huge drag and passed the joint over, but Brian declined. He really wanted me to keep guessing, so I did for about ten goes till I had enough of his stupid game.

  “I asked you to choose the lighter or the keys. And you rightfully chose one or the other like I asked.” He put the lighter and keys on the bench between us and cracked a beer. “And when I asked you to explain why you chose it, you said something about how you’d use it or how it looked—how you could drive it, light it, its colour—anything. That’s wrong.”

  The weed hit me, and I got really interested in what he was saying. “Then? What’s the right answer?”

  “The right answer is that you chose because you chose. That’s it. All the explanations you gave to justify your choice are just excuses your mind made up after the fact.”

  A gong bonged over my head. I couldn’t tell if it was the beer I’d drank and the kush I’d smoked, or the power of his crackerjack philosophy.

  “So that’s the big reveal?” I said. “I chose it because I chose?”

  “Yeah. And when you know that you can just choose to do anything you want.”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” I said. I grabbed another beer, flicked my ash on the grass, and stared up at the stars.

  There’d been too many lectures lately, not enough talking with me. But it seemed Mr. T. was determined to give me another.

  “Love is an important thing,” he said. “And I don’t see that in your life too much.”

  His words lingered around the ceiling fixture and then crept down the walls into my brain. How dare he. My fists clenched around my teacup and near scalded under the pressure of my grip.

  “I take Brian to basketball, to soccer, to canoe in Algonquin Park, and I help him with his paper route. I do it because I love him. He’s my son.”

  The words dropped like a cold stone in my belly. I remembered all the times Mr. T. had invited me to attend Brian’s soccer and basketball games, and how I went out with them on Sundays to deliver newspapers. He’d always included me throughout the years, bought me snacks at Brian’s games when we cheered him on from the sidelines, taught me how to shoot a jumpshot when he taught Brian, showed me how to study for one hour a day, and told me how that added up and made a world of difference in Brian’s reading.

  I searched my mind for any recollection of my grandfather making time for me like that but couldn’t remember anything, except work. There was never any hockey or basketball practice for me or my brothers, no swimming lessons, no canoe trips in the woods, no paper routes, no study time, no interest. We did go to judo for a few months when I was ten, but that was because we got beat up so badly at school, and he rarely stayed to watch us practice. And there were our yearly Cape Breton vacations, but that was mainly about Grandpa, his lobster, and drinking—not us boys.

  Then I thought of my father and wanted to run away.

  Mr. T. dropped another sugar cube in his tea and slowly stirred.

  “For me,” he said finally, “it all changed when I realized I had choice. Choice is the human ability to go one way or the other.” He opened the album again, but this time to a picture of when he must have been in his thirties, in a police uniform, around when I first met him. His wife was beside him with little Brian in front. He paused a second, then turned until he landed on an older photo of himself in what appeared to be his early twenties taking a shot on a billiards table.

  He slammed his finger onto the photo, and I flinched at the force of it. “I was a hustler, Jesse. Was good at it, too. Thought it was all I was worth.” He turned the album upright and pushed it toward me, knocking it into my tea. It was a great photo—his hair was greased back, and the bottom of his jeans were rolled up, exposing ank
le socks and loafers. He looked cool.

  “I had to make a choice,” he said. “Live this way”—he flipped to the police pictures—“or this way”—he flipped back to the greaser photo.

  “So, how’d you do it?” I asked, truly curious.

  “I realized it was all on me and no one could save me—not Mom or anyone. I had to choose to do the work of bettering myself, just like I chose to hustle in pool halls all day. It was that simple.” Mr. T. scratched his chin and admired himself in the pool hall shot.

  I thought he’d offer me more wisdom, but he offered me more tea.

  PREMONITION

  “THERE JOSH GOES WITH HIS feather and that shit he keeps burning and waving everywhere,” I said to Leeroy and my friends out in the high school smoking pit. Rows of yellow school buses hid us from the view of the teachers who routinely scanned the parking lot for students doing drugs. We blazed about three joints and got away scot-free as always.

  “What is it?” Leeroy asked, as he put the roach in his cigarette pack with the rest of the day’s smoked roaches.

  “Some Indian herbs or something. Sage.” I flicked my after-joint cigarette and watched it ricochet off the ground, sending burning ash into the air. I smacked my lips and the taste of cheap cigarettes mingled with the smooth, expensive flavour of Afghan blond hash. “Who the fuck knows, as long as Tonto ain’t waving it at me. He’s gone Indian. Just like my other brother.” I rolled my eyes and popped my jean jacket collar, even as I wondered, What was it?

  Leeroy laughed and agreed that my brother looked ridiculous.

  Later that same week, I was surprised to see Josh come out of the side door of the school. I was skipping off like I always did, but Josh was such a goody two-shoes. Why wasn’t he in class like he always was?

  “Hey, Josh,” I yelled from the smoking pit. “Get to class, you brown-noser!”

  Me and my stoner friends giggled as I took another pull of the hash joint. When my toke was finished, I looked up at Josh, but he didn’t respond.