In the Land of Birdfishes (9 page)

I remembered him and his mother and how they’d tell those stories back and forth to each other. Mara loved them. They weren’t her own people’s stories, but she took them like they were and would tell them to Jason over and over. They both were like that, though, and would sooner give you a coloured-up tale than a simple answer to whatever question you asked them. When we were all still kids, my sister used to bring me by Mara’s house most nights in the winter, and we’d sit there round the stove while she told Jason a story to put him to sleep. The house always had a smell about it like old rotted leaves, like the forest in fall, when everything is waiting for winter. But it was warm round the stove, and Violet and I weren’t the only ones to come sit there to listen. When Jason was not even school-age yet, the stories were mostly from the Bible, or that’s what Mara said, but they were different from the ones we heard at St. Paul’s on Sundays and maybe had the mark of her on them too. For somebody blind, she could make you see every solitary thing she spoke of. I remember in that stale-smelling house half-buried in snow knowing just how a grain of sand shone under a Jerusalem sun. And then when Jason got older, the stories weren’t about God or St. John anymore, but about Raven or Bear, and Mara made them her own too. And even as Jason got older, she kept telling him those stories, one a night, and sometimes he would even tell her a story back, and it was the way they talked to each other and told each other things, because I heard few words pass
between them other times. Remembering the stories Mara told him, I got up and took a seat beside Aileen, to watch her.

And it was then I realized who she reminded me of. Though it had been almost ten years since I’d seen that wide-mouth smile. And though Lopita’s eyes were black and bright and had never looked unsure or caught like Aileen’s always did. But when she showed her teeth, when her mouth stretched around a grin that seemed to catch her by surprise, it made me think of that other smile. And even now, with just the glint of a question in her eyes, I thought of Lopita.

She seemed to be trying to think what to do next, and I knew from her face the story made her like him better, made her want to ask him more questions, made her want to stay here longer. And I knew before I opened my mouth that she wouldn’t believe me. She would be the kind to prefer a well-told lie to the truth. And there’d be nothing I could do to convince her. Not now, when what I’d tell her was true. And not later, when it would be a lie.

Mara

W
HEN WE ARRIVED
at her house, Nellie told me that her own daughters would be home from school soon and I would have to be very nice to them, as I’d be sharing a room with her oldest daughter, Megan, and it would be a surprise to them both to find another little girl living in their home. She took me by the hand and put my suitcase in the other, and then she led me up a flight of stairs.

“Here,” she said, pulling me through a door. “This is where you’ll sleep. Alexander put a mattress on the floor for you, see?” She grabbed my hand and pushed it onto the mattress. I stumbled, startled, and dropped my suitcase. She cried out, and I understood that it had landed on her foot. “You have to be more careful,” she said. “Being the way you are, you won’t be able to go to school. But you can’t be underfoot all the time. You’ll have to learn to be resourceful. The blind are very resourceful.”

She hesitated, and I felt for the mattress behind me and sat down on it. Then I heard her take light, quick steps across the room. “Well, I’ll turn the light off. This room doesn’t get much light, but I don’t suppose you’ll need the lamp like Megan does. See that you check it’s off. The switch should be down,
like this. Come feel. No need to waste money lighting up the room if …” She stopped again, and I withdrew my hand from the switch, which I’d slid my fingers along like she asked. “This will be an adjustment for everyone,” she said at last. “I’ll leave you to get settled.”

After I heard her steps go down the stairs, I lay down on the mattress. I thought about getting up to feel my way around the room, so I’d know where things were and be able to be careful, like she’d asked. But in the end I fell asleep there, and didn’t wake until I heard their voices at the door.

Aileen

late June 1996

“T
HAT IS NOT THE END
of the story,” said Minnie.

I turned my head to find she was now sitting beside me at the bar. Something about her made me nervous, and I had a feeling she didn’t mind that. She seemed always to be watching me and Jason, always nearer than I thought she was. But I was glad for something to say beyond wondering what Jason’s strange story meant and why he told it to me, or if he only wanted to distract me from the question I had asked him. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I heard that story plenty of times, and that’s not how it ends. He made that ending up.”

Jason had his head down, lighting a cigarette.

“It ends with Old Man and Old Woman agreeing that the people will die forever. There isn’t any more,” said Minnie. She had a flat, expressionless face. From her eyes and mouth I couldn’t have told how sharp her words were.

Jason sucked on his cigarette hard and didn’t look at either of us.

“Maybe there are different versions of the story,” I said quietly.

Minnie barely glanced at me. “That end sounds more like something from the Bible or something his mother would say
than anything that ever came out of our Elders’ mouths. I’ve never heard it that way. Never.”

Jason said, “Minnie.”

Minnie looked closely at me then. “He’s a liar, you know. Oh yes he is. You are.”

Jason said, “I don’t have to take shit from you.”

Minnie said, “You ask anyone here. Everyone knows he’s a liar. Isn’t he,” she asked the bartender. “Isn’t he. Don’t you believe anything he says. Nobody does.”

Jason raised his bottle and slammed it down on the bar. Hard. We both jumped. The bottle did not break. As beer foamed and spilled over onto the pitted wood of the bar, Jason shoved back his chair and walked to a table at the other side of the room.

“Jason,” called Angel, whom I now noticed sitting at a table near enough that maybe she’d heard everything. The two of them were like gulls circling a meal. More and more, I felt like the meal. “Come sit down with me.”

But Jason didn’t answer and took a seat without sending a word or a look her way.

I turned back to Minnie. “Why did you say that. Why did you say that to him in front of everyone.”

Minnie said, “He’s got no right to change the stories. He can make up whatever stories he wants about himself. I don’t say anything when he does that. He’s got no right to change the stories.”

Across from us, Angel stood up. Minnie and I watched her cross the room and then lean over the table to where Jason’s head was bent down, studying the table as steadily as I’d seen him do anything. We couldn’t hear what he said, but we saw Angel straighten from the back, her spine drawing up. We saw how quickly she walked out the door after that.

Minnie said to me, “What are you doing here anyway. What made you come here now?”

I said, “I had nowhere else to go.”

Minnie watched me for a moment and I looked away. “That’s how most folks come here,” she said.

I thought I could understand why Jason would say whatever he said to Angel. He made a kind of sense to me. For some reason, I thought suddenly of a time in my twenties, loving Stephan. Of course it was something else with him—it was sex and it was how he looked at me and all kinds of other things besides. But there was that way in me, how I felt like I could look at this man and know him. And because I knew him, I loved him. And because I loved him, I forgave him. You could forgive anything.

I walked to the door and looked out across the street and then pressed my face to the glass to peer down along the road. I couldn’t see Angel anywhere. The sky had a quality of blue in it, a near darkness that I hadn’t seen since I’d got here. I’d heard by August the leaves would begin to change colour. This strange brightness and these dry, hot days were already written over with their end.

Opening the door and letting it close behind me, I imagined the road buried in snow. How high would it rise? How cold would it be?

There was a sound and I saw, around the side of the building, a girl crouched on the ground. A cigarette burned down in her hand.

“Angel?” I said.

Angel threw the cigarette behind the building and stood up.

I didn’t like to see women cry. I caught a glimpse of her tiny, pointed teeth like pearls before she covered her mouth
with her hand. There was a bloodless look about her pale brown face, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and turned away from me.

She said, “He kissed me.”

“He kissed you?” I looked at her. I knew she wasn’t lying.

“And then, inside, he said … I just wanted to know if he was all right. I liked the story he told you.”

I watched her closely. I was thinking that maybe she wasn’t all that bright. I asked her, “What did he say to you?”

She began to speak and then shook her head. Not stupid though. She wasn’t stupid. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“He’s not like you, is he,” I said.

I heard her breathing slow. She stood up. “I’m going home,” she said.

“I wouldn’t think you’d have trouble finding someone else to kiss in this town,” I said. I knew my voice had changed. Gone hard. I said, “You go where you need to, but I don’t know why you’d go home. He’ll be waiting for you inside.”

She said, “You think you know him?”

I said, “All I meant was I don’t think he’d be an easy person to love.” She looked in the window of the bar. Ha. There were some women who could only love men who scared them a little. “I’m going inside,” I said. “You do whatever you want.”

She looked at me and then walked away, down the street, in that slow way she had. Her face and figure were soft, despite the sharpness of her features, but from behind, she looked so thin. From behind, she could have been a child shuffling home.

Inside, Jason was back at the bar again, and Minnie was talking to someone at another table.

“You dare me?” Jason was demanding at the bartender,
who looked bored. She shrugged her shoulders. “You dare me?” he said again.

I came up beside him and opened my mouth to speak, but he turned away, grabbing a pack of matches from the bowl on the bar. He whipped it open and bent the top match back, and in one fluid movement, like a snap of his fingers, he flicked it against the striker and then lit the entire pack on fire. Then he raised the burning matchbook in his right hand and held his outspread left palm above it. “You count for me,” he told the bartender. “I’ll hold it as long as you say.”

The bartender looked faintly interested then. She tipped her head to one side, letting her honey brown curls fall over her shoulder. She had the eyes of a cat, and they narrowed as she gazed at him, unblinking. “One,” she said.

He held his palm so it was less than an inch above the flame and kept his eyes glued to the bartender’s.

“Two,” she said.

The other men at the bar had started to pay attention. I could tell from the way Jason settled into his seat then, a cocky languor easing over him, that he enjoyed their eyes on him. His hand was steady as the flames crept down the matches.

“Jason,” I said sharply. “Stop that. Stop it right now.”

“Three,” said the bartender, an insolent smile sliding across her face. She lowered her elbows onto the bar and leaned over them, so her face was as close to Jason’s outstretched hand as his.

“You’re going to burn a hole clean through your hand, Jason you fool,” said one of the men, but the others shushed him.

“I don’t feel a thing,” Jason said coolly. “You know those guys that teach themselves to eat poison, a little at a time? I’ve been training myself so I don’t burn. One time I lit my whole
hand on fire. It just burned itself out. As far as fire goes, I’m goddamned invincible.”

“Four.” The bartender took her eyes off Jason’s at last to stare with the rest of us at what was left of the matchbook in his hand. The paper matches were burned to the base and all that remained was the thin piece of cardboard that had held them all together, burning between his fingers. I smelled a sweetness in the smoke and thought it was the seared flesh of his palm and fingertips.

“
Jesus Christ
,” I hissed and watched as my hand flew out and clumsily knocked the matchbook from his hand. It scuttled across the bar and the bartender whipped a glass out from the shelf below and caught the last burning scrap as it slid over the edge. Then she turned and dumped it down the sink, without another word.

As if nothing had happened, Jason pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a new matchbook from the bowl. I tried to catch a glimpse of his left hand, to see how badly it was burned, but he clenched it in a fist and tucked it under his other arm.

I sat down beside him. He didn’t look up, but took three swallows of beer in a row.

“She went home,” I said at last.

He took another swallow of beer.

“You want a shot?” I said. He shrugged and I ordered two shots of whiskey. When we drank those, I ordered two more.

“So did you talk to her, or what,” Jason said.

“Just for a minute. She was out there smoking.”

“Angel doesn’t smoke.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. She was out there smoking.”

Jason took a drag on his own cigarette and thought about that.

“She told me you kissed her,” I said after a moment.

“Who’d he kiss?” said Minnie. I hadn’t realized she was behind me.

Jason looked at Minnie and then pushed a cloud of smoke out between his parted lips without taking his eyes from her.

“I’m sorry, Jason,” she said. “You hear me, I’m sorry.”

He turned back to the bar but said nothing.

“Oh Jesus fuck, Jason. Screw you.” She turned and I thought she would leave, but then she leaned in to Jason and whispered, “You think this woman is your friend? You want to call her your family? I’d like to know who you think is going to be here to take your shit when she’s gone. You want to tell her all your secrets, you go right ahead. And then you watch her go. What are you going to do, follow her?”

She turned to me then. She said, “You know he’s left this town three times already. Once he went to Edmonton, to get some oil job there. He was maybe sixteen years old. Dropped out of school for this job. Said goodbye to everyone. Not three months later he was back. He said it was just a contract job, but when he left, he was all like he was never going to see one of us again. Then he said he was going to school. Someplace down in Prince George. Was gone nearly six months that time. Came back and said it rained too much. Said there was nothing they could teach him there. Last time he went to Whitehorse—Whitehorse! Didn’t even cross the border. Said he had some government job lined up there. I don’t believe there ever was a job. Most people don’t. Thought it was just more of Jason’s stories. And what was the reason that time, Jason? Why’d you come back?”

I didn’t look at Jason. But Minnie did. She pulled a stool
up in front of Jason so she had her back to me. “Jason,” she said. “I don’t blame you for coming back. You know I don’t. But I wish to fuck you’d stop going around like you were too good for us here. Every time you come back here you’re madder and harder to take. You treat Angel like shit. And what’s it for? They no more want you in the south than this woman here will give another thought to you come August.”

“You should go,” I said.

“Angel’s worth ten of him,” Minnie said. “If he’d just get over wanting what doesn’t want him, maybe he’d see that. Maybe he’d stop going around with that attitude like he’s better than us, or that look like a beat dog.

“Fuck you, Jason,” she said. And she pushed the stool into the bar so hard it toppled to the ground. She left the bar without speaking to anyone.

“Will you get me another shot,” Jason said.

“Sure,” I said, “sure.” I ordered two.

Into the silence and the drinks between us, I said, “I turned forty last week.”

“Oh,” said Jason. “I didn’t know.”

“Should have,” I said. “Her birthday too.”

“Oh,” said Jason. “I forgot. I guess I forgot.”

“That’s okay,” I said. My tongue slipped a little on the
s
. I was not used to drinking, and now I had drunk too much, too much. “I did too, almost. But all I’m saying is, you’re awfully old to be the son of a forty-year-old. How old are you anyway?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Oh,” I said. I pushed away what remained of the whiskey. No more drinks. “Oh Jesus. Jesus, Mara. Sixteen.”

“She told me she was glad to have me,” said Jason. “She
said my father wouldn’t have married her if it hadn’t been for that, and if he hadn’t married her, she couldn’t have left the school.”

“It was bad there?” I asked.

Jason shrugged. “It wasn’t good,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know, I know.” I looked at the boy, who looked younger when he drank, when his face went all soft around the eyes and mouth like it was now. I could tell his eyes weren’t focusing as easy as they should, and I thought mine might be the same way. “He was from here, your dad?” I asked.

“Yep,” said Jason. A man paid for his beer beside us at the bar and, without a word, slid one over to Jason. Jason took it with a nod, and peeled the label off the glass in one solid piece. “She was in school in Alberta,” he said. “My dad was working there on a job, and he got in a fight that had him in jail for a spell. She was with this Christian group that would go there and read to them from the Bible. Except of course, she didn’t read. She could just talk it at you. She had the whole Bible in Braille, but most of the time she’d just talk it at you.”

Think of the little girl with yellow hair and that voice like mine but not mine, that other that was always and in all things like me but not me. That small hand in my own small hand.

I said, “She was blind? She was always blind?”

Jason said, “She could tell if there was light or dark. She could see if something moved around her.”

Remember that it was not a little girl who got pregnant with the child of a man who did “spells” in jail. It was another Mara. A tall one, grown older, like me. Grown tired, too, and a little ruined.