I was left speechless at this declaration. I started to blush, not used to having people call me pretty. “Do you still know how to jitterbug?”
She smiled. “Yes. Want me to teach you?”
“How come you don’t go to dances?”
Her face cracked wide open as she laughed. “Been a long time since I did anything worth gossiping about.”
“Who gossiped about you?”
“Oh, everyone.”
“Really?”
“I wasn’t always old.”
“What did you do?”
“Cookie?” She handed me an Oreo. “Did I ever tell you about shape-shifters?”
I knew it was a distraction, but I said, “No.”
In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.
The old stories, she explained, were less raunchy than they used to be. There was a beautiful woman who was having an affair with her husband’s brother. She and her husband were paddling back to the village after trading their oolichan grease for seaweed. Just off Monkey Beach, they stopped and he pissed over the side of the canoe. She lifted her paddle and clubbed him. While he was in the water, she used the paddle to hold his head under until he was still. Thinking he was dead, she paddled back to the village and told everyone he drowned. But the next day, when the wife and the husband’s brother went back to hide the body, they found large footprints in the sand. Worried he might be alive, they followed the trail into the woods. They discovered the man—transformed into a b’gwus—who then killed his adulterous wife and brother.
But to really understand the old stories, she said, you had to speak Haisla. She would tell me a new Haisla word a day, and I’d memorize it. But, I thought dejectedly, even at one word a day, that was only 365 words a year, so I’d be an old woman by the time I could put sentences together.
Two days before Christmas, we finally got around to getting the tree. Dad asked me if I wanted to come and help him pick one up from Overwaitea. I was almost going to say no. When we stood in the parking lot, he looked bewildered at the selection of bundled trees leaning against the wall. I wanted to be out of there as soon as possible, so I grabbed a small spruce. We set it up in the living room in the opposite corner from where it normally sat. Mom took out the decorations and threw them on in five minutes. Then we all ignored it.
Contacting the dead, lesson three. Seeing ghosts is a trick of concentration. You must be able to concentrate on nothing and everything at the same time. You must be both asleep and awake. It should be the only thing on your mind, but you can’t want it or expect it to happen. It’s very Zen.
Lie down. Wear loose clothing. Don’t play any music. Especially don’t play any of that New Age, sounds-of-the-humpback-whale music. Be still. Close your eyes. Keep your arms flat by your side, your legs uncrossed and relaxed. Begin by becoming aware of your breathing. Then your heartbeat. Then the blood moving through your body. Expand. Hear the traffic outside, or the wind in the trees, or your neighbour taking a shower. Then concentrate on both your body and the outside world. If you have not contacted the dead after several tries, examine your willingness to speak with them. Any fear, doubt or disbelief will hinder your efforts.
I really need to pee. I wanted to make it to Bell’s Bay before I took a break, but Blind Pass is closer. Unfortunately, three other boats are anchored in the harbour, which nixes my idea of leaning over the side. The speedboat is too small for that anyway, and I don’t feel like pissing into a pail.
I pull up to the north shore of Blind Pass and cut the motor. The boat glides up to the beach, and I take out the oar and pole in when the water is shallow enough until the bow grinds against the gravel. I tie up on a log and stretch. My back has a crick from all the bouncing around. Digging through my knapsack, I discover that the Ziploc bag came open and the toilet paper is soggy and mushed together. I put it in my pocket—I hate using leaves. Ma-ma-oo thought I was spoiled. She hated taking tp on our walks and thought it was a waste of space. The first time we took off together was one quiet afternoon in early spring. Ma-ma-oo was as antsy as I was.
“Let’s go pick kolu’n,” she said. “Too good out to stay inside.”
I put on my hiking shoes, and Ma-ma-oo got her machete, which would perform the double duty of protector against bears and kolu’n chopper. Ma-ma-oo liked to mix the kolu’n with pussy willows and put them in Mason jars. I bought her a vase once, but she put it in her storeroom, where it collected dust, saying it was too pretty to use.
Kolu’n, sapling cottonwood, has oily, nutmeg-smelling leaves with such a strong scent that just a few branches can fill a whole room. Our walks to find the saplings were never short. We wandered through the brush, leisurely looking through the clearings where kolu’n liked to grow, on the alluvial flats and sandbars just outside the service centre in town. We’d park near one of the garages or the Chinese restaurant where Ma-ma-oo liked to get her dried spare ribs. If I chattered and bounced around her, she didn’t lose her temper or tell me to calm down. She watched me with a solemn expression, taking everything I said seriously.
Ma-ma-oo would let me carry her machete if I promised not to swing it around. She was the only grandmother I knew who regularly needed a machete, and I was very proud of this. When I told Ma-ma-oo how cool she was, she just grunted. “Look over there. Get those flowers,” she said as we came to a small meadow with long, yellow grass that had been flattened by the snow and was wilted, half-raised. In the shade of the trees, you could still see sullen grey lumps of stubborn snow refusing to believe that spring had come.
My favourite walk was up the power lines. Running through the village were huge electrical towers with fat black wires that sizzled and hummed. The tower line ran along Walth creek for a while, then zigged up the mountain behind the village. Eventually, if you followed the power lines, they would lead you right to Alcan’s Kemano hydro dam.
The first time we went up there, Ma-ma-oo put her jacket down and we sat on it. We could see the village below, hugging the shore. I put my thumb out and could blot out a quarter of the village. Tiny cars winked brightly in the sunshine and people were dark grains moving along the roads. The ocean glared yellow light, bounced it back at the sun, which had reached its peak and would set behind the mountains in about five hours. Swallows swooped and darted over our heads. Ma-ma-oo handed me a thermos cap filled with iced tea. I picked out the bits of lemon she had put in and sipped. Her iced tea was always bitter because she hated using sugar. I’d greedily gulped my juice long ago, so it was tea or nothing. We sat in the sunlight until we were rested, before heading back down the mountain.
Blind Pass is relatively calm. It’s a favourite spot for spring salmon to rest and mill around. Ma-ma-oo wintered here a couple of times when she was a little girl. I look over to see if any of the boats are fishing, but they all seem to be waiting out the squall. One of the people sitting on top of a forty-foot pleasure cruiser lifts an arm and waves lazily. I wave back. Something glints and I realize they have binoculars. No pissing near the beach, then.
The good thing about the rain is that my trip into the bushes is bug-free. My Deep Woods Off is pretty useless right now, but I’m glad I brought it, just in case the weather clears up. The sound of rain on leaves is broken by the dull roaring of a plane overhead, hidden by the clouds. It’s most likely one of the jets that lands at the Terrace-Kitimat airport. I
find it ironic that if you’re flying in from Vancouver, you can look down and see Kitamaat Village, but you have to land fifty kilometres north and make an hour-long car trip to get back there, when the airplane took only five minutes to travel the same distance. Maybe someday they’ll have a service where you and your luggage are booted out of the plane and you skydive to your destination.
“Hello! Hello!” a voice calls out when I emerge from the woods. A young white guy, probably eighteen at most, is paddling a kayak to shore.
I stop, putting my Ziploc bag behind my back.
He grins and pushes his blond hair out of his sunburned face. “Are you from around here?”
Oh my God. The last thing I expected was to have some guy try to pick me up. I shove the Ziploc bag with the toilet paper into my coat pocket. “Yes.” My brain is having trouble switching gears, and I do small talk with him on autopilot. He tells me how glad he is to see someone his own age and how he hadn’t realized it would be so empty in the wilderness. He goes on to say how beautiful it is, how spiritual it is getting back to nature, and then asks if I want some coffee.
“I’ve got some, thanks. You don’t smoke, do you?”
“Like a chimney!” he says, reaching into his front pocket. “But it’s raining pretty hard. Why don’t you come back to our boat? We just finished lunch, but if you’re hungry we can warm up some soup.”
At the best of times, I can’t imagine anything I’d want to do less. I shake my head. “That’s okay.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I know I’m being pushy. But it’s been just me and my folks for the last four weeks, and to tell you the truth, they’re driving me nuts. Big time.” He tosses me his pack of cigarettes. Marlboro. “Four weeks of nonstop nagging. Why don’t you go to law school? Ninety-nine per cent of all bands never make it to the big time. You should go to law school. You need a back-up career, don’t you?”
“Why’d you come?”
“Blackmail. Sheer blackmail.” He clambers out of his kayak and splashes to shore, soaking his jeans to his waist. “If I had to do it all over again …” He holds up his lighter for me. “By the way, I’m Greg.”
“Lisa,” I say. I cover the cigarette with one hand as I smoke. Ah, tobacco, whose sacred smoke carries wishes to the spirit world. Please let me find Jimmy. After the way I was sucking the smokes back yesterday, you’d think the spirits would throw him in my lap just to shut me up. Greg lights his own and smiles down at me. I hold the pack out, but he says, “Keep it. I’ve got three cartons back on the boat.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“Bad place to run out. So. What’re you doing out here?”
Lie, think of something fast. Leave out the missing brother. “Meeting some friends.” Yeah, good one: you came out here to get together over a coffee. “Over in Bishop’s Bay.”
“The hot springs?”
“They’re doing some fishing. We said we’d meet today, but I didn’t expect this much rain.” Don’t babble, keep it short.
“Is it a party?” he says, desperately hopeful.
Make it sound boring. “No, just a bunch of us hanging out.”
“Oh,” he says. I can tell he wants me to invite him, and he’s on the verge of inviting himself, so I look at my watch.
“God, I’m late. Thanks for the smokes.”
“What’s a few minutes?” he says. “Say you got held up in traffic.”
If I was thinking more clearly, I would have made a graceful exit instead of mumbling apologies, hopping in my boat and shoving off like he had the plague. He waved forlornly as I ripped around the point.
Jimmy picked up a lot of self-affirmation tapes when he was training and would repeat them out loud at breakfast. One of them said: only commit yourself to something, and the universe will move to help you get it. “Thank you, universe,” I say, firing up a second Marlboro. I inhale deeply. Ten lonely little cigarettes roll around the half-empty pack. If I ration them, they’ll last until Namu. I didn’t become a real smoker until I started hanging around with Pooch. Frank and Cheese would go to wild parties that Pooch wasn’t allowed to go near. His brothers went to them but always booted him out. After I got back from a long day at school, we would commiserate with each other over the unfairness of it all, and almost without fail, end up sitting on the church steps. I filched cigarettes from Dad and he filched them from his grandmother and we’d smoke furtively behind our hands, hiding what we were doing from passing cars and pedestrians. Once, while we were sitting there, a blue BMW slowly drove past us, with three little blonde kids pressing their faces against the windows, their eyes round as they stared at us as if we were dangerous animals in a zoo. The adults excitedly pointed at us.
“You wanna moon them?” Pooch said.
“Naw,” I said. “Our asses might end up on a postcard.”
Pooch flipped them the bird instead. The woman in the passenger seat snapped a picture.
“See?” I said. “You’re gonna be famous now. Your postcard will read, ‘Indian boy gives ancient Haisla greeting.’ ”
He laughed and flicked the butt of his cigarette down the steps.
Pooch’s father had committed suicide. His mother was missing in action. He and his two brothers lived with his grandmother in an old house. When I first went to his house, Cheese was with us and was hungover and grumpy, avoiding his parents’ wrath. Pooch’s gran was about eighty and always looked tired. When we came in, she offered us homemade candy. It looked like a humbug but was white, and after a few minutes in my mouth, it became chewy and soft.
Pooch was a tad odd. As he led us to his bedroom, I noticed just above the entrance to his bedroom, someone had hung a deer skull, yellow with age, horns curving up like cupped fingers. It stared at me through hollow black sockets as I followed him down to the basement. I paused at the top of the steps. He had painted his bedroom black, even the tiny windows. The darkness reminded me of a cave. He had a dozen black candles as wide as my wrist set in waist-high brass candle holders, that formed a circle around his bed. His headboard was filled with dolls that, when I looked closer, were hand-stitched. Each had a name printed on it. I was shocked silent, but Cheese didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it.
“What’s all this?” I said, looking around Pooch’s spooky room.
“A psych. A head game.” Cheese picked up a doll and sat down on the bed. He held it out for me. “Give it a try.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t fool around with that,” Pooch said.
“You two are sooooo gullible,” Cheese said. He picked up a pen and drew pimples over the doll’s face. Raising an eyebrow at Pooch, he said, “Wanna give our favourite uncle a missing limb? Think it’ll work?” He picked up a pair of scissors and snipped off a toe. The candle flared. Pooch jumped. Cheese rolled his eyes. “Gullible. It’s in the dictionary. Beside your picture.”
Pooch opened a black bag and poured a tiny amount of fine black powder into a saucer. “This is a pretty good hex.” He lit the incense, and as he took the doll from Cheese’s hands he said:
Powerful demons of the deep
Harm my enemies as I sleep
I command thee, I command thee
Go forth and destroy.
“You believe this stuff? Cheese said.
He shrugged. “My gran says—”
“Your gran says. You believe everything she says?” Cheese threw a book, Voodoo for Beginners, at me. “It’s just a game. Call it the power of negative thinking. Works for Pooch. If he didn’t have all this crap down here, his brothers would steal everything. But they think he’s a big freak, so they stay away.”
“Shut up!” Pooch said, shoving him.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
Pooch grumbled and said something under his breath. Cheese asked him to go get us something to eat. Pooch glared at him. “Don’t touch anything.”
I tossed the doll on the floor. “This is stupid. What else do you guys do around
here?”
Cheese grinned. “We’re famous for that, you know.”
“For what?”
“The Haisla. We were masters of the psych-out. When the Haida or the Tsimshians paddled down the channel, they knew they were coming into the territory of some of the greatest shamen who ever lived. That’s how we survived.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Think about it. Here we are, this little group stuck in the middle of all our mortal enemies. They didn’t cream us because they were spooked, man. It’s just like voodoo. You’ve got to put on a good show. That’s all witchcraft ever was.”
I hit him with a pillow, but later I flipped through the voodoo book. Some of the helpful chapters included “To Overcome Legal Problems”; “Proper Use and Care of Voodoo Dolls”; and, my favourite, “To Keep a Place Rented.” In the chapter “To Communicate with the Restless Dead,” I found a spell. I didn’t have any of the ingredients and thought I’d probably skip the recommended orgy. But the rest of it seemed easy enough, and it was worth a try.
The first time I tried it, nothing happened. I fell asleep. Jimmy woke me for breakfast. The second time I did it, I saw neon-coloured geometric patterns swirling and merging until I was so dizzy that I had to open my eyes or puke. The third time, I felt like the bed was on water and it was rocking in the waves. I drifted upward, floating, watching spinning lights swirl in front of me, and then I didn’t feel my body. When I tried to open my eyes, I snapped awake. I sat up, yawning and stretching. It had been relaxing, I was thinking, until I heard the creaking. It was the little man. But this time his red hair was stringy red and he was hanging by his neck from a yellow rope, smiling at me as he swung back and forth.
I heard crows cawing and screeching. I went to the window and saw they were gathered in a circle. They lifted off the lawn, and I could see a dead crow with a missing wing. It lay at an odd angle. It was small and young, in the process of molting into its adult feathers when something had caught it and chewed it almost raw. Alexis crept out to it and sniffed the body. She was dive-bombed a few times before she ran off, meowing. Jimmy ran onto the back lawn and carefully cradled it against his arm. He stood in the predawn greyness and flung it upward. I watched the transformed baby crow soar upward, shrink to a tiny dot, then disappear behind the clouds. When I looked back down, the lawn was empty and the crows shifted silently on the back porch, waiting.
Monkey Beach Page 18
