In the Land of Birdfishes

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  I didn’t mind that. “What do you mean.”

  “Well, take Angel. You want to tell me she hasn’t lost half her mind already?”

  I got up to grab another beer. “You sound like Minnie now.”

  “Well, it’s cruel, Jason. To you, it maybe feels like something you can stop and start. But there’s nothing about the way she looks at you that knows any kind of stopping.”

  “That’s not true.” I needed her to understand this, so I stood so close she had to turn the water off and look at me. I tried to tell her why she was wrong with my eyes. “You just don’t understand how it is. Besides, she’s going around with John now.”

  Aileen laughed, but her mouth wasn’t smiling. “I wonder if you’d take it so well if you didn’t know you could stop that any time you wanted. I’ve got this feeling she means more to you than you think.”

  “Shut up,” I said, but tried to make it a joke. “You’ve got some mouth on you. Some big, dumb mouth.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” she said, turning the tap back on, and I got out of her way. “Broken folks—and I guess I’m probably one too—don’t always look it. I’m an easy one, because you probably don’t have to look at me too hard to figure it out, and maybe that’s why people never take to me.”

  “I take to you.”

  She ignored me. “At first, I thought I loved Stephan because he was wholer than me, wholer than anyone else I knew. He looked clean as soap. Things affected him so much, but in a way that seemed good. Like he felt everything. But he didn’t get bungled up in it like I did. Because he could feel something so much, and then a moment later, he could think of something else. I thought that must be the right way to live. And then, when I figured out I was wrong and he wasn’t whole at all, I loved him because he was brokener than anyone else. Maybe I loved him even more then.”

  “I’ll bet he was looking for you,” I said. “Maybe that’s what the letter is about. You don’t have to go back to him, but I’ll bet he misses you.”

  “Shit,” she said as a glass slipped from her hands and cracked against the sink. She put her wet hands over her eyes, until I turned off the running water for her.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Jason,” she said, uncovering her eyes. “I’ve got to know what happened to her.”

  I picked up the two halves of the glass and laid them gently in my other hand. It was a clean break.

  “I feel her everywhere, Jason. I feel surrounded.”

  But it was a lie, because upstairs, her bedroom was the way she left it, but now it was full of Aileen’s things, her clothes in her closet, and the bed never made. And I couldn’t hear her there. Though I listened as hard as I could, I couldn’t hear her there.

  From behind, Angel looked like less than she was. But stronger too. You wouldn’t be sure, looking at her walking away from you, if she was stronger than you were or not. From behind, you noticed how short she was, not much taller than when she was a kid. But with these hard muscles in her calves now. Everything about her soft, but then those hard, round muscles. And then, when you looked at her right on, the corners of her eyes. Her lips.

  I watched her up ahead of me for a while before I caught her. I liked the slow way she walked, liked watching it. In everything she did, she was slower than everyone else. I was late to meet Aileen for lunch at the Midnight Sun, but I followed her anyway. And then when all of a sudden I found myself missing her, like there was something sad about her walking away from me, even going as slow as she was, I caught up with her. Without even hurrying, from a block away.

  “Going someplace, Angie?” I asked her, and she turned around, and those eyes of hers looked happy to see me. They were like two dark, wet fish, her eyes. Shining and liquid and pointed up at the ends like two finned tails.

  “It’s the Moosehide Gathering, Jason,” she said, like I should know that or did but was pretending not to. “I’m late. I guess you are too.”

  I shut my face as fast as I could so she couldn’t tell I’d forgotten and wouldn’t have caught her if I’d remembered.

  Before he died, my father and some Elders decided everybody should be dragged up to Moosehide every summer to have a big party, like it was some kind of homecoming. But it was a lie. It was a lie that said we were fine. It was a lie that said everything was okey-dokey, because all we really needed was a goddamn beaded vest and some company. The lie said don’t be angry anymore. The lie said we were proud, when I knew we were ashamed.

  Moosehide was nobody’s home now, if it ever was. My father himself had told me that our people had always travelled with the seasons and the animals. He said it used to be that only white people got stuck in the ground like trees, and we were like the wind. Moosehide was just the place we got shoved off to after white folks struck gold across the river from the closest thing to a home we’d ever had, the fish camp at Tr’ochëk. After that, I guess they started thinking those little houses across the water didn’t look so shabby after all, and maybe they could buy them for a song from some Indians too dumb to know that when you sold your house you sold the land out from under it too. Tr’ochëk was the home we’d chosen for ourselves. Everywhere else was a place that we’d been sent to by a bunch of honkies who likely thought if they just shuffled us around enough, sooner or later we’d disappear.

  I’d gone to the first gathering. It meant so goddamn much to my father. And then, after he died, I said to Minnie, “But it’s pretty stupid, isn’t it, everyone in those stupid costumes, banging around on those damn drums?” and she didn’t answer, only looked at me and shrugged, like she wasn’t on my side either. Her parents, like my father, were the last to live up there. When the school closed and the government said all the kids had to go to Dawson now, a few families waited a long time before they followed after, and hers and his were two of the last to leave. And he was only a boy then, but all his life, whenever he used the word home, it was Moosehide he meant, the way for Ma it always meant that sea-soaked nowhere she came from.

  But I thought a home was a pretty poor thing if that was all it was, a place where something used to happen or an idea that had got caught like a kite in a tree. And after he died, I didn’t go again.

  So I had nothing to say to Angie, but she stood there looking at me like she knew everything I wasn’t saying. “I’ll walk you there,” I said finally. “I’ll walk you to the boat.” We were already almost there.

  “Jason,” she said after a minute, “you know I’m with John now?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Old John, good old John.”

  “I just wanted to tell you. I guess I don’t know why.”

  Minnie always told me to be careful with Angel. When my father was alive, he used to ask me if I’d noticed how pretty she was. “If I were you, I’d treat her like she was worth something,” he’d say. “Some women have a gift for seeing good where there isn’t much. It would be nice to wake up every day and be looked at by a woman like that.”

  “Maybe he’ll take you to Vancouver,” I said. “Fly you around in his plane. Take you to the city.” There was a goat I kept behind the house a little while, when Ma was still alive.

  It didn’t last long. I kept it tied up the whole time. It would look at me like Angel did. I liked that goat being there. Sometimes I could hear it going on at night, and so I didn’t have to look at it to know it was there. After I found it dead, I had to untie the rope. I could have cut it, but I laid that dead thing on my lap and pulled at the knot until there was nothing around its neck.

  “Maybe,” Angel said.

  There was some true thing about her that I felt close to knowing, right then.

  “Remember that time you went with Ma down to Whitehorse,” I said.

  “Sure,” she answered.

  “It was funny she asked you to go with her, not me.”

  She was staring down at the river like she was looking for something there. “Sometimes it was hard to figure out the things she
did.”

  “Yeah.” I looked at the river too and thought I wouldn’t mind going for a swim in it like a tourist. It was hot enough I wouldn’t mind that at all. “But it was funny though. Must have been weird, just the two of you in the car.”

  “It was.”

  “And whoever she got to drive. Three of you then.”

  She looked at me steady, with those eyes like dark and shining fish, and I understood nothing about her.

  We were quiet till we got to the river, where all the boats were waiting. Then Angel stopped like she’d remembered something. “Jason,” she said. “Does Aileen still talk to that husband of hers?”

  “Nah,” I said. “She got a letter from him a week ago, but she couldn’t even open it.”

  I felt like I had to cover my ears not to hear what she was saying with her eyes.

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “What do you got to tell me, Angie?”

  She looked away. “Saw her on the phone the other night. After The Pit, when she said she wasn’t feeling good and left. I stayed another hour, and on the way home, I saw her on the pay phone.”

  “Must have been talking to her lawyer,” I said. “Or somebody here in town even. Or she must have people back in Toronto or Halifax. She’s allowed to call them, I’d say. None of our business if she wants to call them.”

  “Okay,” Angel said. She looked down at the boats. “You sure you don’t want to come.”

  It wasn’t a question, not really. “I’ll see you around, Angie.”

  “Okay,” she said again. “Okay, Jason.”

  I watched everyone turn to welcome her and help her into a boat. Her aunts and a man I didn’t recognize, all dressed up like they didn’t know how stupid they looked in their feathers and beads. I watched how they looked glad to see her, and how she looked happy too, and I hadn’t seen her look like that, not look at me like that, not for a while. They all had big, bright smiles on their faces. They looked like there was going to be something really special waiting for them when they got up to Moosehide. But none of them fooled me. There was no way they could fix up there all the things that were broken down here.

  When I walked into the Midnight Sun, I saw Melvin before I saw her. He was sitting on one of the bar stools with his back to me, but I knew him from the spread of him over that tiny stool. He was the fattest man in town. You could forgive a guy for a lot for looking like a balloon stuck on the end of a pin. It was as if he’d sat there to be funny. What other guy would spear himself into a seat like that? But then I looked at the arms on the chairs around the tables, and it hit me that he couldn’t squeeze himself between them. And then I remembered that what pissed me off about Melvin was that he didn’t act like he knew he was fat. He always wore these big suit jackets that he must have got made specially, as if he thought he was somebody important.

  I had to walk all the way around him to find her, slumped over the bar, a little unspooled, on the other side. At The Pit each night, I’d try to get her to drink with me but she almost never had more than one. She said she was afraid of embarrassing herself. One night Angie’d had to help her home, and she could hardly look at Angie the next day for the shame of it. But Melvin was a boozer and everyone in town knew it, and though it was still the afternoon, I could tell he’d managed to pour a couple drinks in her. I could count how many she’d had from just one look at her.

  “Jason!” she said, pitching herself off the bar and out of her seat. I had to slow down to let her calm herself and sit back down. For a second, she looked like she thought we were going to hug, like I was her girlfriend or something.

  “Well, let’s get you a drink,” said Melvin. “Did your aunt tell you we’re celebrating?”

  What I hated most about him was that accent. It sounded like he was making fun of himself, which he couldn’t be doing, because no man in a suit jacket ever made fun of himself. So he was making fun of me or Aileen or whoever was listening. Talking slow like he was stupid, when he must have thought we were stupid, believing that phony redneck accent coming out of a big fat man that went to some fancy school in the States. Talking slow like we had all the time in the world to listen to him. Even when I let my eyes rest on his and didn’t say anything, he didn’t look bothered.

  “I’ll get you a pint,” he said. “Two pints—or should I make it three?” he asked Aileen.

  “Just two,” she said, shaking her head a little too hard. “No more for me. Too many for me.”

  I was thinking about what Angel had said and how I could figure out if it was true. If she had called that man.

  “Nothing for me,” I said. “It’s lunchtime,” I said, eyeing the two of them. She should be embarrassed. Middle-aged lady, loose-faced this early in the day with some fat guy at some bar.

  Her face showed she heard me, but I couldn’t understand her expression as she stared up at me. I wished her face were an answer.

  While Melvin called to the bartender, she patted the stool beside her, a little unsteadily. “Sit down, Jason,” she said, her voice unsure. I wished her face were a sentence. I wished her face were a sentence that said if she’d called him or why she’d gone to that pay phone to do it and what she had said and what it would come to mean.

  Melvin didn’t show how many glasses he’d had, though his face was pink and beads of sweat kept appearing on his forehead, which he seized with a cloth from his pocket—it was the only gesture he made that didn’t have a weird, ladylike feel about it. I wondered if he was a queer. I wondered what women or men ever saw the big, naked fact of him.

  “So, Jason,” he said. “I was just toasting your aunt. She’s got some darn interesting ideas, and a good head on her shoulders. She’s going to make a great reporter.”

  On the stool beside Melvin, Aileen was still watching me with the same mystery of a look on her face. She seemed to be waiting for something, to want something from me.

  “Jason,” Melvin said, lifting his glass into the air, “your aunt”—and if he said it like that one more time, he was going to lose a tooth—”is my newest hire. I’m making her associate editor. That’s a full-time, year-round job.”

  She was grinning at me. “Jason, I told you I was going to stay.”

  It didn’t mean anything. I thought of all the things it didn’t mean. So she’d stay in my house, it would be our house. Or I would help her find a place. An apartment, or maybe she’d buy a house of her own. So it was true what she’d said and she wouldn’t leave. And it didn’t matter who she’d called or hadn’t called. September would come and all those other tourists would be gone, and she wouldn’t leave.

  The two of them looked at me with grins on their faces, but Aileen wasn’t sure and hers slipped a little as I said nothing.

  “So this is a celebration, Jason,” Melvin said, and his smile had too many teeth in it. “Just a special little get-together in your aunt’s honour. A remarkable lady.” He swept his glass up into the air and tipped it at Aileen. “To this remarkable lady,” he said. “My dear, welcome to the Light.”

  And then he turned to me. “Oh but you don’t have a drink, Jason. Let me get you one, so we can toast your aunt.” He waved at the bartender, but I shook my head and twisted my stool around to lean my back against the bar.

  “I didn’t tell you,” Aileen said, whispering as if no one but me could hear, “that he would be here because I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I wanted you to come. I wanted you to hear him say it.”

  And she had a need in her that didn’t need her mouth to tell it. She had a need in her and it wasn’t Melvin or Stephan who could answer it. She needed me to say it was okay, okay that she had the job, okay that it was this joke of a man who would make it possible for her to stay, okay that she was going to leave behind everything she hadn’t brought with her in the suitcase I’d carried to my house. And so I said it was okay, and she put her whole self in my arms.

  Over her shoulder, Melvin raised his eyebrows at me and nodded at her empty
glass. But it was not because of the booze that she had her arms that tight around me or anything else he understood.

  Her voice was a whisper in my ear. “I’m glad I came, Jason,” she said.

  I’d held drunker girls before, girls who fell like this into me, their bones somehow gone soft and loose enough for them to be more blanket than girl, girls who whispered in that same wet way in my ear and wanted me to take their clothes off. But nobody wanted anything from me like she did. She wanted me to take her whole self and say that was okay too. She wanted all of me to be a family for her. She once told me that she came here to ask my mother to forgive her. And now that Ma was gone it was only me that could.

  I poured what I could of her onto her stool again. Melvin put one of his big fat hands on her shoulder to hold her still and safe, and I knew the way he looked at her as he did that he would let her work at that paper as long as she wanted. He was her boss and wide as a door and maybe a queer to boot, but for a second I thought maybe I didn’t mind him so much after all.

  I told the bartender to get a beer for me, and when it came, I raised it up to her, and she gave me a big, loose smile. And as I swigged it back, I thought probably I’d forgiven her the first day she was here. Because she’d come that far to find me. And then because she stayed.

  Mara

  FIFTEEN

  THE OCCASION OF OUR first meeting was Marla’s wedding. I liked that phrase. An actress in a film Agnes’s mother had once taken us to said it like that. In a voice that sounded like she owned everything, she’d said, “How well I remember the occasion of our first meeting.” It was a glamorous, dignified thing to say, so different from anything the nuns or anyone who visited the school would ever say. Agnes and I took to saying it to each other, and soon the other girls did too. We were pretending to be something that didn’t yet seem impossible. Only the older girls then had begun to suspect that no such occasion might ever occur, and that there might never be any meeting of anyone at all.