8
Aunt Mary was still snoring when Bernadette got the girls out of bed to get them breakfast and ready for school. She’d accepted her role now as the surrogate parent in this household.
She liked the girls. They had an easy way about them, and Aunt Mary—well, she was going to take some getting used to. There was a tension Bernadette felt around her, and she knew she wasn’t a blessing being dropped on them, but all in all, it wasn’t bad either as Aunt Mary could earn more money now.
Bernadette placed cereal and toast on the little kitchen table for the girls and made herself her usual toast and tea. She heard some movement from the bedroom, and Aunt Mary stood in the doorway.
“Did we wake you? Sorry, I was trying to keep the girls as quiet as possible,” Bernadette said.
Aunt Mary walked over and tussled Amber’s hair. “Hard to keep these two chatterboxes on low volume.” She kissed Abigail on the forehead and made herself some tea. “I wanted to see you before you went to school today. How was your first day, you make any friends?”
Bernadette gulped her tea and almost choked on it. “Well, not exactly, I did meet a few people.”
Aunt Mary stirred her tea and looked down at Bernadette. “You need to be careful whom you make friends with there. The school has a reputation for being tough. I’m hoping to move us to a nicer place once I get some money ahead then get a better job.”
Bernadette chewed on her toast and watched her aunt Mary collapse in the kitchen chair. She looked exhausted.
“How was the tavern last night?”
“Pretty packed. I was run off my feet. The people in this neighborhood sure can drink, and they’re not bad with tips either. I made over a hundred bucks last night. Took me a whole week to make that working days,” Aunt Mary said.
Bernadette nodded her head and drank her tea. She felt bad, an extra mouth to feed that her aunt Mary didn’t need as a burden. “You know, I have some extra money I can put towards food.” She took a twenty from her pocket and pushed it towards Aunt Mary.
“What’re you going to do about school books and supplies?” Aunt Mary asked.
“Already bought them. I had some extra cash from a part time job I had up north,” Bernadette said. She didn’t want to mention what the job was—it was fleecing the town kids in poker games on a weekly basis.
Aunt Mary stared at the twenty. She let it sit there and sipped her tea. “You getting along well with the girls?”
Bernadette smiled. “We’re doing fine, aren’t we, girls?”
Abigail beamed back at Bernadette, “Yeah, mom, Bernadette took us out to…” She stopped when she saw Bernadette’s frown.
Aunt Mary looked from the girls to Bernadette; she could see there was a conspiracy and knew it involved ice cream or candy. “Just go easy on the sweets with these two. I haven’t got extra money for dentist bills.”
Bernadette nodded as she got up to get her things to go to school. She put on her denim jeans, a white t-shirt with a hooded sweat shirt and runners.
“You not wearing your kickin’ boots today?” Aunt Mary asked.
“Ah…no.” Bernadette said. “They make my feet sweat when I’m sitting in class all day.”
“Good, those boots would be just asking for trouble at your school.”
“Yeah, you’re right, thanks for pointing that out,” Bernadette said, slinging her backpack over her back.
Abigail and Amber wiped their mouths, gave their mom smeary peanut butter and jam kisses, and followed Bernadette out the door.
Bernadette dropped her cousins at their school, adjusted her backpack. With head down, she made determined strides to school.
She felt more incognito, like she’d fit in with students this time. No more waving her black boots and battle gear, there was a sense of contentment in her like this time she would just fit in and get along with the other students..
The feeling lasted until she heard the words, “Hey, bitch.”
Her head snapped up to see Susie leaning against the fence. Her crew was there as well. They’d been waiting for Bernadette. It was obvious in their smiles, her arrival was their morning’s highlight.
Bernadette slowed in her tracks. Susie approached her with a swagger, showing her crew she was in control of this young plaything she’d found.
“We saw you on the soccer field last night, you was wearing our colours. Why you doin’ that when I gave you a beat down? Didn’t you get the message I gave you? You need another one?”
“No, I think I’m good. I didn’t have time to go home and change,” Bernadette said.
Susie looked back at her crew. She wondered if this explanation from Bernadette was sufficient. They shook their heads in mock disbelief at Bernadette’s lack of respect.
“Huh,” Susie snorted then spit on the ground. “You think you’d a had the time to change, when I said you were disrespecting us.”
Bernadette shook her head. “I told you I didn’t know you had a code, or dress code or whatever…” She motioned down to her feet. “See I changed my shoes, I changed my jeans, t-shirt, and my jacket. I’m no longer dressed like you, so why don’t we call it lesson learned and I get to class.”
The crew behind Susie let out a howl of laughter. One yelled, “Oh, Susie, she’s sassing you now. The little bitch giving you lip.”
“Is that it, you think you can talk your way out of another beating from disrespecting me?” Susie asked. She was balling her fist, marching towards Bernadette.
Bernadette dropped her backpack and turned sideways. She stared at Susie over her left shoulder, her right fist was balled, ready to land a knock out punch to Susie’s chin.
Susie’s fist landed in Bernadette’s back. A sharp pain shot through her spine. She crumpled to the ground.
“Damn, she’s stupid, she didn’t see it coming neither,” Susie yelled to her crew. “It’s almost like beating up a baby, she’s so stupid.”
“Hey, cop’s coming,” a gang member said.
Bernadette heard Constable Myers overhead. “You know, Bernadette, you need to give up this fighting, you’re not good at it. This is the second shit-kicking I’ve seen you take. You may be wearing Susie out, but at this rate you won’t make it to Christmas.”
Bernadette rolled over and got up. “God, the girl can punch.”
“The crazy stance—why’d you do it?” Myers asked.
“I saw Jimmy Smits do it on NYPD Blue last night,” Bernadette said, trying to gain her normal breathing.
“Oh god, it’s a cop pose for holding a weapon. You don’t do it in a fight. When you stand to the side, you give up two of your weapons, which is your left hand and left foot. Nobody does it in combat,” Myers said.
“What are you talking about, this isn’t combat—it’s kids fighting,” Bernadette said.
“You know what, you’re just going to get your ass kicked until you learn some skills. It’s obvious you want to keep standing up to those kids, so take this card,” Myers said as she handed Bernadette a business card.
“I’m not going to call you every time I get a beating.”
“Nope, not my number, it’s the address of a dojo.”
“A do—what?”
“A dojo, a martial arts school. I train there three times a week. I’m going to get you three free lessons.”
“I don’t think I need it.”
“From where I stand, you do…but if you don’t want to come to the martial arts school, you need to take one piece of advice.”
“What’s that?”
“Take the long way around to school in the morning and afternoon. If you make a right before the school and run through the track field, you’ll miss Susie and her gang. They think this is their turf—avoid it.”
Bernadette picked up her backpack. “Thanks fro the advice.” She could feel the pain in her back and tried her best not show how injured she was as she continued to school.
She eyed the long track field and wondered how much longer it
would take her to get to school. Tomorrow she was going to try it.
9
“Come on, pick up the pace, Callahan, you’re lagging behind,” Coach Boz screamed from the sidelines.
Bernadette tried to push herself harder. There was nothing there. Her legs felt like lead, and her breathing was wrong. She’d been taught a slow, steady rhythm in distance running. Gasping for breath was for sprinters.
It had been almost four weeks since Coach Boz, short for Bozniak, had seen Bernadette running across his track each morning and afternoon. He’d approached her and asked her to join his track team. She’d agreed. Running with a group of other girls her age seemed like fun. It was until this past week.
“Callahan, close the gap, you’re losing your team,” Coach Boz screamed again.
Her group was getting away from her. She was being dropped, the worst fear of any distance runner. The distance was eight laps around the four-hundred-metre track.
Bernadette had been building up to this for two weeks. She had always been in the lead, usually way ahead by a hundred metres. But not today—the past three days had been troubling her.
“Come on, Bernadette, you can do it, you can catch up,” Melinda Cooper yelled from the sidelines as she passed. Melinda wasn’t on the track team. She’d come to cheer the girl’s track team and been Bernadette’s number one fan.
Bernadette had befriended Melinda to ask for her help in math class. The kid was a total geek who excelled in math and sucked at meeting people. She helped Bernadette understand math, and in hanging with her, she met people. Bernadette called it a symbiotic friendship. And Bernadette liked the girl.
Melinda’s words made her push herself. She gained a few metres on the group and then fell behind again. Her dreams were bothering her, that and her aunt’s strange behavior.
The strange dreams had begun with ravens flying overhead. Ravens were good omens to native people. So why were they a problem? They’d sent a chill, and she’d wake shivering, and then the wolves appeared. She’d heard them howling. They sounded so real she’d wake at night to see if they were outside the apartment window.
The dreams were unsettling. So was her aunt bringing men home to sleep with. Her aunt and some big man, both reeking of beer, would shake her awake and tell her to sleep in the other room. The lovemaking sounds would keep her awake until her aunt’s companion would leave an hour or two later.
The combination was beginning to unravel Bernadette. She’d held on for as long as she could. It was showing now in her stride. Lack of sleep and worry was draining her energy.
“You got a piano tied to your butt, Callahan,” Coach Boz yelled as she passed on the fifth lap. “There’s twelve hundred metres left, when you going to make a move?”
Fatigue was hitting her. She wanted to stop running, lie down beside the track, and let the earth fold over her. Her eyes gazed at soft grass. If she just stopped…all the pain would be over.
She knew she couldn’t, because she wasn’t a quitter. She would run, she would finish. She relaxed her breathing, made it more rhythmic by drawing a breath deep into her abdomen and letting it all the way out. Much better. Deeper breathing meant more oxygen to the blood.
Her pace improved to two hundred metres behind the group—she was gaining ground. Was there enough track left in the race to make it happen?
She got lost in her thoughts again. Was she about to lose her aunt to alcohol like she’d lost her dad? How would she look after the girls, take them back to the reservation? No, that wasn’t an option, she wasn’t welcome there—too dangerous for her and for them.
The bell rang. One lap left to go. She broke from her thoughts. She looked up. The group was farther ahead. She picked up speed, almost to a sprint; she closed but the group was picking up speed as well, they were in the race now, and the positions mattered.
Coach Boz was screaming for her to run, echoed by Melinda. They sounded far away, like down a well or the end of a tunnel. Suddenly she burst into the present. She crossed the finish line twenty metres behind the other girls.
Melinda handed Bernadette a towel. “Good try, Bernadette. I knew you’d have closed on them if you’d had more time.”
“More time? My god, the girl had three kilometres to close in. What was going on out there, Callahan?” Coach Boz asked. He stood there, clipboard in hand, dressed in grey sweats with his whistle and stop watch hanging around his neck.
Bernadette looked up at Coach Boz. “Sorry, Coach, it’s a case of wrong anatomy—you know—head up my butt.”
“And what have I told you to do when it happens?”
“Windex my navel and keep running?”
“Exactly,” Coach Boz replied with a smile. The girls on the team adored him. He was mid-forties, stocky with a paunch showing his track running days were over, but he knew the sport inside and out.
“Don’t worry, Bernadette, you’ll do better next time,” Melinda said.
“Can you give us a minute, Melinda?” Coach asked.
“Sure,” Melinda said, but she wasn’t happy to be excluded from the conversations. She wandered away at an amble to display her feelings of being left out.
“Anything going on, Bernadette?”
“What’d you mean?”
“As in going on at home or your school work?”
Bernadette bent down like she needed to catch her breath. She didn’t want to meet the coach’s gaze. A tear was forming in her eye. She didn’t know why. “No, Coach, I’m fine. Just a bad day I guess.”
“I’ve seen you outrun those other girls in the past few weeks. I make you for a world-class distance runner. You could get a scholarship if you’d continue running at the pace you ran last week.”
Bernadette wiped her face with her towel and stood up. “Yeah, I know, Coach, you said that last week.”
“Don’t you want to go to university? I could have scouts here from several universities in Canada and the United States for next year’s spring meets if you kept running like you did last week.”
Bernadette shook her head. “I don’t know what I want to do yet, Coach.” She ran the towel over her head. “Look, I’ll clean up my act, I’ll get my head out of my butt and run hard for you and the team—team?”
“Go run a few recovery laps. Get your head aligned and think about your future as you run around the track,” the coach said. He walked away, peering down at his clipboard and wondering if his track star would keep fading.
Bernadette threw her towel aside and started running the track. She began at an easy pace and then picked it up slightly. Coach Boz’s words were echoing in her head. University had never crossed her mind. Hell, she’d never thought beyond high school.
Any job paying above minimum wage would be fine. She didn’t want to end up slinging beer in some dive like her aunt. She’d even consider driving truck or digging ditches so she could be away from office work and be outside.
The first lap was easy. She settled into a steady pace and thought about whether she should call her grandma. Maybe Grandma Moses could interpret Bernadette’s dreams, and if she came to the city she could deal with Aunt Mary too. Grandma Moses had a special way with people. She could see into their hearts and minds.
The last lap felt even easier, so she decided to do one more. She was halfway round the track when she saw some figures in black by the bleachers. Was it Susie and her gang?
She wasn’t sure, and the next lap would have her run by the bleachers. Anything could set Susie off; why chance it, Bernadette thought. She cut across the track field and headed for the showers. She had an hour before picking up her cousins.
The shower was hot. Bernadette let it run down her back and loosen the muscles in her legs. She appreciated the school showers. They were all individual, with their own privacy curtains, and she could linger in them as long as she wanted.
At home, there was always an Abigail or an Amber pounding on the door wanting to get in, or wanting her for something. This was as close t
o her own sanctuary as she’d ever find.
All the other girls had left. They’d given her reassuring words then disappeared. Their incessant chatter echoed down the hallway until there was just the sound of water and Bernadette. Pure bliss.
The shower room door opened. Boots sounded on the tiled floor. Bernadette held her breath. She turned off the shower. No one was allowed in here with street shoes.
“Hey there, Bernadette, don’t worry, just us girls come to pay a visit.” It was Susie’s voice.
“Yeah, come to pay respects to the track star,” another female voice said.
Bernadette began to shake. She breathed in deeply. Don’t show fear she told herself. She pulled open the shower curtain. “Thanks for the visit, girls, but I got to get home now.” She reached for her towel from outside the shower—Susie grabbed it.
“Not cool, girls. Gimme the towel and I won’t tell Coach Bozniak you were in here, okay?” Bernadette said with as much feigned authority as she could muster.
“You going to tell on us, little girl? That’s what you going to do?” Susie asked. She came closer to Bernadette.
Bernadette shielded her body as best she could with her arms.
“Cute bod you got there, girl,” one of the girls said. She was tall, tightly encased in a black t-shirt and pants bulging with her excess fat. She didn’t seem happy Bernadette was so fit. It was sarcasm, not a compliment.
“Look, this isn’t funny; give me my towel back, now,” Bernadette said. She was over being scared, she was angry. They’d invaded her space, her sanctuary.
“Why don’t you take it from me, track star?” Susie asked, dangling the towel just beyond her reach.
So many alarm bells were ringing in Bernadette’s head. If she waited them out maybe the janitors or another student would come by, and this would be defused in a minute. But the towel, it was a red flag as it would be to a bull.
She jumped from the shower and grabbed the towel with one hand and landed a punch to Susie’s head with the other. Susie went down on the floor.
Black Wolf Rising (Prequel to the Bernadette Callahan Mystery Series) Page 4
