I never went to Marla’s wedding, which was to a boy from her hometown who worked at a pork farm and was said to be not all there but very kind. But the nuns gave Marla permission to invite three girls on our floor to go to town to celebrate with her the night before, escorted by Marla’s older sister. At dinner a week before the wedding, Father McGivney informed me that I was one of the girls Marla had chosen.
We so rarely were allowed to leave the school that we looked forward to the evening all week. We planned what we would wear, and one or two of the nuns even, reluctantly, helped us find our nicest dresses from our scant wardrobes. Just before breakfast on the day of our outing, Sister Margaret knocked on my door and put something soft and silky in my hands. “I thought you might like to borrow my scarf to wear this evening,” she whispered. “My mother left it to me, and it’s a pity it never gets worn.” She hesitated. “You don’t know this, but you look very beautiful in green.”
Marla’s sister came to pick us up before we’d even eaten dinner, because she told us she would buy us dinner in town. I knew from the way the other girls discussed in whispers in the back seat what sort of restaurant we might be taken to that I was not the only one who had never been to one before. The car smelled of leather and smoke, and Marla told us proudly that it was pink and had a top that could go down in the summer. We all wished desperately that Marla had not chosen February for her wedding.
The place Marla’s sister took us was not a restaurant but a café. Music played so loudly in the background that I could hardly hear the man who came to ask us what we would have. “Can’t they turn the music down?” I hissed to Marla, but Marla’s sister laughed and said it was not a record but a real band playing right there. I was embarrassed that she had heard me, and pretended to know the name of the band when she told me. Marla’s sister went to art school in Toronto and was studying to be a sculptor. I felt overwhelmed by my luck at having taken the seat beside her. She spoke very gently to me, and often touched my shoulder warmly when she teased me, to let me know she wasn’t being cruel. But she was quick to grow restless or bored, and sometimes I would find when I answered one of her questions that she had already turned to talk to someone else.
She ordered root beers for all of us and then read from the menu. “Well, what would you each like?” she asked when she had finished. None of us said a word, and she laughed, and when the man came to ask what we wanted, she told him we all were having hamburger platters.
By the time our food came, the band had stopped playing and so I could hear everything everyone said at the table, even the boy Marla’s sister had invited to join us, who then took all her attention away from the rest of us.
“How are the eats?” Marla’s sister asked triumphantly after we’d had a few bites.
“Better than anything,” one of the girls said. “There’s nothing like this at school.”
“Like heaven,” agreed another.
Mine was already cold and so greasy it soaked my hands and mouth. After each bite, I had to draw my napkin across my lips and fingers, and soon it was steeped in oil and useless. I tugged Marla’s sleeve and asked if I could borrow hers, but she said no and sounded annoyed.
The boy told us a story about New York City and a musician he’d met there. He pretended he was telling the story to all of us, but I knew it was only Marla’s sister the story was for. She pretended not to know that and started digging in her bag when he got to the funniest part. “You got a light?” she asked.
When we all had finished, she announced, “Well.” I had to turn my face away from her, toward Marla, to keep from coughing at the smoke that circled me from her cigarette. “What do you say we get something a little stronger than root beer. This is a celebration after all. My little sister’s hen party. Why don’t we blow this Popsicle stand and find somewhere we can get a real drink?”
“I know a pub just around the block,” the boy said, too eagerly, and then tried to recover. “My buddy’s a bartender there. He won’t have a problem serving a few minors if I tell him they’re with me.”
“Sounds like a plan, man.” Beside me, she pushed herself out of her seat and I heard her cigarette hiss into extinction in her glass. “Come on, kiddos.”
Marla’s sister said it was too close to drive, though I was more excited about riding in her car again than I was about going anywhere else, so we held hands as if we were already back at school, and followed Marla and the boy to the pub.
The moment we were inside, I wished Marla had asked Agnes or any of the other girls instead of me. I’d never heard so many voices or so much noise all in one room. I suddenly thought the band at the café had not been so loud after all, and at least it had only been one noise, and a person could make sense of one noise, but not of all these different ones, all happening at once.
Marla’s sister ordered a glass of something for each of us, and mine was sweet and strong and I was surprised by how much I liked it. I drank it down because I did not know what else to do with it, and then Marla’s sister laughed at me and said, “Wait for the toast, greedy!” She rubbed her hand lightly in my hair and ordered me another one. “A little slower this time, please, little lush.”
Then she said how proud and happy she was for her sister and made what was called a toast. And then people banged their glasses together, even mine, and after that I was allowed to drink again, and I drank this one even faster than the first.
After that the noise became something impenetrable, and I felt it push and pull me around the room as I tried to find my way to Marla or her sister or a chair. Suddenly I stumbled, the music and voices tugging me down, down toward the floor, and then I was in someone’s arms, strong ones that plucked me out of the noise and dropped me into a chair.
“Well, well,” said a man’s voice. “For such a little thing, you sure are heavy on your feet.”
I started crying then and didn’t know why. The man got so close then I could smell cigarettes on him and something else, something salty and strong—maybe his drink or his skin itself. The smell was comforting, almost animal. It was the opposite of clean, but it wasn’t dirty. He smelled like something teeming, full, rich, deep. “Where did they go?” I asked the man.
“Those friends of yours? I think they stepped outside. Gone to smoke a little hash with Joe, I think.”
That made the tears fall faster and I was astonished with pity for myself. I rarely cried, and it seemed something very sad must have happened to me to cost so many tears.
“Don’t you worry, I can go find them for you,” said the man. He put his hand around mine and everything stilled. The room was, for a moment, perfectly silent as my hand disappeared inside his.
“Your hands are like Da’s,” I whispered.
“You want me to go find your friends?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You want me to stay here?”
I nodded, tears stopped.
“You can’t see, can you,” he said, sounding sorry.
I shook my head again. It was so nice and easy just to say nothing, though every time I moved my head I felt dizzy again. It was so kind of him to speak so I could be silent.
“What a pity. Pretty girl like you. What a tragedy. Were you always like this?”
Once more, I shook my head. Then, softly, shyly, I told him, “I still remember things. What my mother looked like. I had a sister. She looked just like me. It was a long time ago, but I still see those things, and that’s not like being blind, is it. I can still see those things.”
He squeezed my hand tighter in his. “No, that’s something, I guess. That’s something for sure.”
“Will you—” I was so bold it amazed me. I wished Marla’s sister could see how bold and adult I was. “Will you get me another one of those drinks?” I asked.
I heard him stand up, and he let go of my hand slowly. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He took a few steps away and then I heard him approach again. “Now, don’t you scamper away,”
he told me before he headed back to the bar.
When he came back, he had a drink for both of us, and the one he gave me was stronger and more bitter than the last, but I liked it too. “How old are you anyway?” he asked me, and I told him I was eighteen. “Me too,” he said, and we both knew that both of us were lying. But we didn’t care, and he took me outside when we’d finished our drinks and couldn’t see Marla’s sister or the other girls there, and he thought maybe they went behind the alleyway, but when we got there, he said there was nobody there either. And then he told me how cold I looked, and he put his arm around me and said his truck was back there if I wanted to come in and warm up. And then when we were inside, he put the radio on, and I heard some woman singing about being alone, but I wasn’t alone, I was with this man, who after a while turned down the radio and touched my cheek and put the heater on, rubbing his hands before it till they were warm and then he put them under my shirt, and I helped him take it off. The scarf that Sister Margaret said would make me look pretty got caught in my hair, but we took that off too, and then he had his lips on mine, and then, like I had made him crazy, made him an animal instead of a man, who would do anything, he put his tongue in my mouth, and it tasted like the drinks we’d had, and then he asked me, “Do you want me to take you back inside now?” and I couldn’t say no, couldn’t say anything, thought nothing except How weak is thine heart, but I shook my head and he understood and then he pulled me onto him like I weighed nothing at all.
“What is your name?” I asked when it was over, and he told me, “Jason.”
Angel
late August 1996
SIXTEEN
THERE WAS SOMETHING I KNEW. And I kept it deep in my head, and I kept it quiet there, and I didn’t tell anyone the thing I knew of myself, but went on knowing it, all the same. I knew it the way my heart beat and knew it beat. I knew it the way air found a way to my lungs and knew how it did. All of me was the fact of what I knew, a secret that was in me and part of me, and I told no one.
August now, and all the dying leaves and grass were shrinking into the dirt that they were made from. There was gold in the dying grass and the flowers that had become seeds. Gold even in the sky, which made a little space, at the end of days, for dark to come, blue and deep, for a few hours and then it was gone again.
And then one day, rain came. After all the dry weeks and days, rain came down, so hungry for the ground it fell all over it, fast and heavy, spreading slick, wet fingers over all, all. All the town was an appetite for the rain that fell, without stopping, from the long grey sky. I called to Momma that I was going out, and she yelled, “In this weather?” and I didn’t answer.
I left my shoes on the porch so that I could feel the wet grass on my bare feet. And then I stepped into the road, where a thin river was hurrying along the tire tracks, heading downtown. I felt the cool mud slide between my toes and it made me smile.
And then I followed the road down to the end of town, and then I climbed down the bank to the river and by then the rain had turned slow and soft.
The river moved so fast. If I were to fall into it, it would carry me away and I would have no choice but to let the river change me, to make another plan for me and where I was going. I wondered if all the salmon we fished from the river were our people, and they had long ago fallen in the water and found it ran too fast to fight. I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be one of those silver backs that flashed in the water. I imagined being snatched out of the pull of the waves and brought to land to feel for the first time what it was to not be carried by the water, to be urged toward something by every bone and scale. Some fishy thought in the salmon’s brains must tell them the place where they are going. They must dream it will be somewhere beautiful and without pain.
And then I thought of the nets that would tear them from the river and all the beautiful, dark fish thoughts that they’d had there. They would feel air and all of a sudden, just like that, they would be full of knowing that air took them nowhere, led them to nothing at all. Open close, open close would go their gills. And their gills would not bring them oxygen, could not. Into the air, out of the net, back again. Snap go their spines, which cannot ever take them back to the river.
I loved salmon, which knew what they were and did not fight to be anything else. Their travel on the river was what they were made of. They could no more resist than have lungs or wings.
When I was a child, Papa used to take me out in his boat to fish for dinner for our family. But I would just lean over the side and watch those dark thoughts swim under the water. It would make him mad, most times, or sorry, shaking his head when he asked me to show him what I’d caught and I would have nothing to offer up to please him but a song I’d made up about the salmon. But the last time he took me in his boat, he said at the end, “Next time I’ll take Charlie. Your heart is too good. You may well turn out to be happier for it. Hungrier, but happy.” He went out one more time with Charlie after that, and then, another season later, he died.
I crept to the lowest rocks and sat. My feet were tucked under me and I bent to touch the water with my hands. It was so cold that it took all the feeling from my fingers.
I thought that I had not made so many decisions in my life. I would have liked to be like the salmon, but instead I had just always said, “River, take me where you will go.”
And I had a thought that from time to time would come to me. The thought came to me as a knife can open something soft. I had thought that loving Jason was one single, fierce thing I had done. I thought I had swum toward him as if all the river ran downward and I ran up. I thought that was a good, brave thing, loving someone who didn’t want it. I thought one day the river would say, “Angel, I am tired and you have never been tired. Let me take you to him.”
But then I saw that it was possible also that all this time the river had been carrying me just behind him. And I had never, not once, been like the salmon.
It was that night I went to The Pit to find him. Not John.
A band that must have come from somewhere down south was playing. The singer’s face was shiny with the sweat coming out of him, and as he sang, he would toss his head to take the hair out of his eyes, but it would stick to his face, and the sad way he sang made me sorry for him and his too-long hair and too-shiny face. This was true of white boys, and I had seen it before, how they would sweat for no reason at all, and make their pinky faces even pinkier. No native man I knew made singing a song look like hard work. But this kind of music sounded like work too, like the song was being scraped out of the singer and the band was trying everything they could think of to stop him.
And I sat there, listening and waiting, because I knew he would come. He came every day. He came to see me, I had thought once. It had gone through my head like a cloud passing over the sun, that thought, but when it was gone, there was the sun again and it would always be, as I would always know better.
And I watched the door open and she came in, without him. I had come to think it was for her he came to the bar now. If it had ever been for me, it was not now.
“Hello, Angel,” she said.
“Hello, Aileen.”
But I did not think it had ever been for me.
I watched her wonder if she should sit with me and then wish she had pretended not to see me at all. I watched her finally take a seat at the bar with her back to me. Because of how he’d looked at me the first time I told him, I hadn’t let Jason know how many times now I’d caught her on that pay phone. I didn’t think she’d ever seen me find her there, she was so swallowed up by whoever was at the other end of that line. So I couldn’t ask him if he knew who she was calling or if he noticed she looked happy now, as she had not when she came.
And I sat there, turning the spoon in the grounds at the bottom of my cup, looking at her back and thinking of her sister.
I was only just thirteen when she came to me and whispered I was to ride to the city with her in her car. Since that day
when she’d told me I was to watch after Jason and wait for him, she’d had a way of talking to me, like there was a secret between us. And then there was.
We were all bent over our bowls of oatmeal and listening to Charlie boast about the pretty mule deer doe he’d shot that morning that still lay staring from the bed of his truck. I had seen it there, and looked into its dull black eyes, and I had touched the sticky fur where all that was living in the deer had seeped out. And it was that I thought of when the phone rang, and Papa answered and then said that Jason’s wife wanted me to go to the city with her, to pick out a present for my thirteenth birthday, though already it had come and gone. Papa said he wasn’t sure, but Momma said, “Oh go ahead, she’s a good girl and deserves a special treat, like a ride into the city with that white lady.”
And I remembered what Minnie had told me she had seen, at the beginning of the summer, and wondered what Mara wanted from me and why she would ask to take me all the way to Whitehorse when she never went anywhere. But I had never gone away from home overnight without my brothers and sister, and felt a longing in me at the thought of a whole wide bed to myself and of coming back to tell June and Jude all I had seen in the city, so I said, “Please, Papa, I never went to the city before, and June went three times already,” and he nodded very slowly and said, “Tejù! I have told you you must learn to ask for what you want, or others will take it from you.” “I want to go to the city with Jason’s mother,” I told him then, and he said, “All right, little one. All right.”
And I’d thought that Jason would be going with us, that he would drive, and I would ride in the seat behind him and his mother and feel his glance on me in the mirror maybe, while the wind blew in the window beside me and snatched up my hair, and maybe he would let me lean outside and feel the air beat back my hand when I reached it out. He’d only got his licence a few months before, but he’d been driving for years, since he was fifteen. Mara needed him to take her places, and she never seemed to want to ask the other Jason, her husband, not for that or for anything. There was a silence grown up between them like a bed of weeds. He never reached out his paddle of a hand to slide over her hips or bottom like Papa did when Momma passed him in the kitchen, and she never slapped his hand away, like Momma did Papa’s, rolling her eyes with a look of happiness. Once, I sat beside Mara, showing her how to do beading the way they taught us at culture camp, and Jason’s father came and stood in the doorway, watching her for a long time before he told her, “Mara? I’m going to make some dinner now.” And she never showed she knew he was there, but I felt her hand tighten around the thread as soon as we could hear his steps on the floor, and all the time he stood there, she hardly breathed, and she dropped the beads for the first time that afternoon. And so I wondered what it was they both were listening to when they weren’t speaking to each other, but I was too young and never knew the answer.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 17
