The Marrow Thieves

by Cherie Dimaline

  I was ten then, and I watched the military shuttling the cleaner citizens to new settlements and gated communities. We hid in a Dumpster we shared with a mute named Freddie when the school staff came for the Indians. Freddie was Malaysian, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Freddie’s wife had been carried away at the food bank and she was from Taiwan, but no one believed her. There was good money in snitching on Indians, and people would call in if a Swedish girl wore a braid in her hair. That’s why we stopped going to the food banks: the volunteers called in Indian sightings and next thing you knew, a wave of white vans screeched up and off you went, kicking and screaming, watching yourself in the mirrored reflection of their sunglasses, throwing boxes of macaroni and cheese and screaming to some god or devil or anything in between. We’d heard too many stories about the death camps, the way we were being murdered real slow.

  One time, we were half a block away when they showed up. We watched them carry off an old man and his grandson before we remembered to run. I’ll never forget the way that man looked when they tossed his grandson in the back of the van like a bag of rice. I watched his soul fold up on itself like a closing door. The light and warmth and humanity clapped shut in his eyes because he couldn’t protect the one thing that mattered. There was no coming back from that, even if he did manage to walk away later on, which he wouldn’t.

  My mom traded favors for booze since food wasn’t really her priority. She might have already known she was dying by then, anyway. I wonder if you can feel poison in your blood? If your veins feel tighter or your pulse gets thicker somehow? Anyway, I was left to feed myself.

  I was a runner and I could go for hours without having to stop or even slow down. The way a good sprint turns your breath to a low whistle, the way it spring-loads your knees: that was my drink. I was addicted. At first I’d run for the joy of it. But once we ran out of food, I did it in trade. You needed a message brought to your brother on the west side of the city after phone service was cut? I was your messenger. You needed medicine and weren’t well enough to get to the pharmacist? I was your girl. But it wasn’t free. You had to put gas in the car if you wanted it to drive. I charged a tin of soup for a short jaunt, a full loaf of bread and a jar of pasta sauce for trip any longer than the immediate neighborhood. And business was good. After the phones were cut, cell service was blocked in an effort to persuade the leftovers to either move into the new developments or to fuck off and die. It also made it easier to isolate the Indigenous and stunt the growth of community. I was in demand. And for something other than what was under my PJs.

  I ran for a whole year before they caught me. Not the government assholes. Just regular assholes. Everyday assholes. The kind of assholes that move around in packs because they’re too weak to be alone.

  They caught me on a bogus run they’d put in, sending a stupid hillbilly-lookin’ Indian hopped up on opiates to commission a run. I’d seen him around enough to nod when he passed me. Sometimes he was with my mother. And I recognized his state well enough not to slow down. Today, though, he came with a job.

  “Easy money,” he said, drooling onto the back of his hand. “Nothing serious,” he lied, handing over Danishes in advance as payment. I should have known right then.

  I was to deliver a sealed envelope to the West Side by sundown. I ate two of the Danishes right off. They were good, not even two days stale. I put the remainder in my backpack. I should have eaten them all then and there. I should have never taken them to begin with.

  I set off full speed, sucking sugar out of my molars and just real pleased with myself. I ran down the tracks left in the potholed road from the old streetcar line. When I got to the building in the west, there were two guys standing guard out front. They had baseball bats, real ones, not the whittled two-by-fours most people carried, and wore sunglasses. I should’ve never shown them the envelope. I should have thought better about following them inside the double front doors of the old deli when they started laughing.

  Inside it was cold and mostly empty. There was another guy behind the old counter, wiping down the steel surfaces in the front kitchen and serving area. In the main room were a couple of round tables with broken chairs. There was another group of men there, quiet now as I walked past with my letter held in front of my chest, like it would keep me safe.

  I followed the guard into the back, all eyes on me, where I found a man with red kinky hair and a wide nose sitting at a low desk.

  “So,” he said as he stood up, “you’re the runner, yeah?”

  I tried to stay hard. “Boy, you’re a master of observation.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. His front teeth had been sharpened to points by bone or grinding or evolution, I couldn’t be sure. My legs started to shake. He stood and walked around the desk, sitting on the edge of it directly in front of me, arms across his thick chest.

  “She’s feisty,” he remarked to the guard on my left. “I like that.” They chuckled together.

  “Here’s your letter. Paid in full. I’ll be going now.”

  I extended the letter to him, pushing it against his nylon track suit jacket.

  “Wait, wait now, runner. Don’t you wanna see what’s inside?”

  “None of my business.” I shrugged, still holding out the envelope he wasn’t taking.

  “Oh, you’ll want to stay for this.” He finally grabbed it, running a long, smooth finger along my hand when he did. The guards moved in tight on either side of me as the redhead took the envelope back to the desk and sat in his taped-up leather chair.

  He tapped it on his forehead. “You see, runner, I have a new business venture I’ve been trying to get off the ground. I have this idea that we can provide services where the fair city of Toronto has decided to rescind theirs.” He pointed with the envelope to the guards on either side of me and to the door. I turned to see the men from the front room gathered there. Watching. Waiting. The Danishes in my stomach turned to gas and burn.

  “But.” He tore open the end of the envelope and blew inside. “Seems like someone already beat us to it. Nobody wants to pay the prices we’ve set for our communications excellence on account of some squaw bitch who’ll do it for a tin of food.” He turned the envelope upside down and shook it. Nothing came out.

  Decoy.

  “Fuck.”

  I turned, tried to run, adrenaline kicking into my joints like electricity. The guards looped their big arms in mine and lifted me clean off the ground. The redhead laughed, and the group at the door, they joined in now, making their way into the room, eyes flashing. I kicked and swore and swung my trapped limbs so hard my braid wiped at my own eyes, so I closed them.

  I didn’t see when they carried me to the broken freezer, when they locked me in and lined up outside. I only saw for one minute when the redhead made his way in first, unzipping his jacket and untying his pants.

  “Look at me.”

  I opened my eyes. He stood there in the freezer light, brown chest bare, a silver knife in his hand. “You’re gonna stop your little business, yeah.”

  I nodded quick, all my bravado gone, breathing so hard my nose burned.

  “I’m gonna make sure of it.” He moved fast, too quickly for me to do anything but close my eyes again. I didn’t feel the slice. Just the wet on my cheek, and neck, and chest. Then he was pulling off my pants. Then I stopped feeling all together.

  Later, I heard I was there for two days. Two days in that freezer with the lineup replenishing itself every time it ended. And when they let me go, I limped out, holding my stomach, my eye already shriveled. I limped home to my Dumpster, to my mother, to Freddie the Malaysian. There was no more running. Instead, I hid. Freddie tried to clean me up and stitch my face, but it was already scarring. I didn’t care. Neither did my mom. She’d started smoking crack, which was plentiful, to replace the booze, which was scarce. She barely moved out of the way of her own piss if she
wasn’t on the hunt for the next rock.

  When I could walk, I did. One block, then another, then a field, past a line of trees, and into the bush.

  Gone.

  And the dick who set up the run, who handed over the Danishes and scurried off into the alleyways, that was the man I saw a week ago in the woods. I’m sure of it.

  “Is he coming to take Wab back to the bad guys?

  I jumped at the small voice behind me, pitched high with terror. RiRi had crept into the room.

  “Did those bad guys work with the murderers? And why do they murder us slow?” She was on the verge of hysterics, trying to hold it back in the way she did when really scared.

  God, how long had she been there? What did she hear? And how could I take it back?

  “Oh God, no!” Wab was mortified, holding her hand over her mouth. She slumped down on the couch, shaking her head, eyes closed now.

  Miig sighed and motioned RiRi forward.

  “Come, daughter. Time to hear Story.”

  STORY: PART 2

  This time Miigwans picked up where he’d left off the night that Rose first arrived.

  “The Earth was broken. Too much taking for too damn long, so she finally broke. But she went out like a wild horse, bucking off as much as she could before lying down. A melting North meant the water levels rose and the weather changed. It changed to violence in some cases, building tsunamis, spinning tornados, crumbling earthquakes, and the shapes of countries were changed forever, whole coasts breaking off like crust.

  “And all those pipelines in the ground? They snapped like icicles and spewed bile over forests, into lakes, drowning whole reserves and towns. So much laid to waste from the miscalculation of infallibility in the face of a planet’s revolt.

  “People died in the millions when that happened. The ones that were left had to migrate inward. It was like the second coming of the boats, so many sick people and not enough time to organize peacefully.

  “But the powers that be still refused to change and bent the already stooped under the whips of a schedule made for a population twice its size and inflated by the need to rebuild. Those that were left worked longer, worked harder. And now the sun was gone for weeks at a time. The suburban structure of their lives had been upended. And so they got sicker, this time in the head. They stopped dreaming. And a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.

  “People lost their minds, killing themselves and others and, even worse for the new order, refusing to work at all. They needed answers, solutions. So, up here, the Governors turned to the Church and the scientists to find a cure for the missing dreams. In the meantime, those who could afford it turned to sleep counselors, took pills to go to bed and pills to wake up, and did things like group hypnosis to implant new dreams.

  “At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?

  “That was the first alarm set off in the communities. We thought that was the worst of it. If only.

  “We were moved off lands that were deemed ‘necessary’ to that government, same way they took reserve land during wartime. Because no one cared about long-range things like courting votes for the next election and instead cared about things like keeping valued, wealthy community members safe; there were no negotiations. We were just pushed off. The new migration from the coastlines was changing geography daily.

  “And then, even after our way of life was being commoditized, after our lands were filled with water companies and wealthy corporate investors, we were still hopeful. Because we had each other. New communities started to form, and we were gathering strength. But then the Church and the scientists that were working day and night on the dream problem came up with their solution and everything went to hell.

  “They asked for volunteers first. Put out ads asking for people with ‘Indigenous bloodlines and good general health’ to check in with local clinics for medical trials. They’d give you room and board for a week and a small honorarium to pay for your time off work. By then our distrust had grown stronger, and they didn’t get many volunteers from the public. So they turned to the prisons. The prisons were always full of our people. Whether or not the prisoners went voluntarily, who knows? There weren’t enough people worried about the well-being of prisoners to really make sure.

  “It began as a rumor, that they had found a way to siphon the dreams right out of our bones, a rumor whispered every time one of us went missing, a rumor denounced every time their doctors sent us to hospitals and treatments centers never to return. They kept sending us away, enticing us to seek medical care and then keeping us locked up, figuring out ways to hone and perfect their ‘solution’ for sale.

  “Soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling. That’s when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms.

  “We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”

  BACK INTO THE WOODS

  There was something beautiful about the way the woods were now. I had no context for a before and after comparison, but I knew that the way things were now could not have existed with so many people and so much scavenging before the wars and the relocations.

  In this time, in this place, the world had gone mad with lush and green, throwing vines over old electrical poles and belching up rotten pipelines from the ground. Animals were making their way back, but they were different. Too much pollution and too much change. Miig said if we gave them another half a century, they’d take everything back over and we would be the hunted. But for now, like always, we couldn’t sit around on the couches and contemplate our world and what might lie ahead. We were outside, getting ready.

  Snow fell in a light dusting now. It looked like glitter scraped from the underside of clouds by the scrubby top branches of the pines. The skeletons of the green trees curved under the elegant weight of the snow, bowing and twisting like ribbons in the wind.

  “Last snow of the season. Late, too. Damn seasons poke into one another with this new Earth.” Miig put enough weight onto each of us so that we just began to buck, and then stopped, patting our loads and looking to the next one up to be burdened.

  None of us were happy. We wanted to stay at the lodge. It was warm and had walls and made us feel less in danger, less chased. Maybe that’s why he wanted us gone so quickly, before we lost the will and instinct to keep moving altogether.

  Wab was still moving slower today after her binge, but if things had changed between us from her cracking wide open like that, she didn’t let on. RiRi was quieter than usual, but she worked hard to process Story in silence, not wanting to prove our theories of her being too young to know the whole truth.

  We pulled a load of heavy cans and propane canisters and a welded hibachi barbecue in the trailer cart we’d found out back of the resort, along with Minerva’s share of the camp carry. For now she was doing okay. The few days inside had done her well, and she sang under her breath and into the top of her sweater, a nursery rhyme about a fiddle and a cat.

  Had the few days at the Four Winds done me good, too? I wasn’t sure. I’d gotten closer to Rose the first night, but then she’d fairly avoided me the rest of the time. I’d heard Wab’s coming-to story, but I kind of wished I hadn’t. It was still too torn on the edges to file
away. Having to watch Ri’s face from the truth of our predicament was gnawing on me, knowing that she knew there were no conversations to be had, no treaties left to be signed, that we were a product and that wasn’t going to change any time soon. There was the run or there was death with nothing in between. And sleeping inside just made me dream about my brother. It was nice to see him, but always by the end of the dream he was gone, and in some horrible rending kind of way. Better to be in the forest, I thought. Where the dreams were shrouded in fog and cold and the group knew its order and stride by the weight of our want.

  “We’re into April now,” Miig said. “See the buds on those trees?” He pointed up with his thin lips. “We’ll have more cover soon. And more sickness because of the wet ground.”

  No time for sickness. At the beginning of winter most of us came down with a bad cough that shook our ribs and rattled our heads, which responded by leaking thick mucus into our scarves and onto our sleeves. Minerva boiled cedar branches and pine needles into medicine and fed it each of us every two hours.

  “Sick makes her nervous,” Zheegwon told me. “She lost a baby one year to the sick.”