Monkey Beach (11 page)

I stand up. Stretch my neck, my arms, then shake out my legs. I ended up napping on the porch again. Staying inside is out of the question. Feel antsy. Must move. Must do something. Aunt Edith has probably scrubbed the house right down to the foundations. The clouds have blocked the stars and moon. The lights from the village twinkle in the high tide, but much farther down the channel only the red beacon flashing against the black shows that there’s anything out there. I lean against the railing, get the chills as the dream comes back in snippets, flashes of bright Technicolor.

Aunt Edith speaks urgently into the phone, but when I walk into the living room, she smiles at me. “It’s your mom.”

I take the phone. “Any news?”

“No,” Mom says. “We’re going out to Namu tomorrow morning. Edith said you were sleeping. Sorry to wake you.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “Good to hear you made it down in one piece.”

It must have come out odd, because there is a long silence from Mom’s end. “We had a good flight.”

“Good, good. That’s good.” As the awkward pausing goes on and on, I think, if you say a word long enough, it loses meaning. What’s “good”? What the hell am I trying to say? Fuzzy thinking. Need a hit of coffee. I say this and she laughs.

“No more coffee. Just get some sleep, Lisa,” she says. “Your dad wants to say hi.”

“Okay.”

The phone clunks down. Mom says something I can’t quite catch, and Dad comes on, breathless. “Hi, how ya doing?” Overly cheerful, in full and complete “nothing’s wrong” mode.

“Tired,” I say.

“Just got out of the shower,” Dad says. “Everyone’s being friendly. They say there’s a good chance we can pick him up on one of the islands. He’s such a strong swimmer, they think he made it even if”—a couple of words from Mom that sound like For Christ’s sake—“even if we can’t find anyone else,” he finishes quietly.

“I know you’ll find him,” I say.

“You be good,” he says.

“You too,” I say.

We mumble goodbyes, and as I’m hanging up the phone, Aunt Edith hands me a mug of chamomile tea. It’s got at least a half-cup of honey and a sprig of mint. She sits beside me. “Why don’t you just go to bed?”

I nod. “In a minute.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I just ate.”

Aunt Edith lowers her head and gives me a stern look over her glasses. “You missed lunch.”

Caught, I don’t bother to deny it. My stomach growls.

“How about some half-smoked?” she says.

“Sounds good.” I say this mostly to stop her from hovering over me. I know she’s being considerate, but it gets on my nerves.

She opens a jar of half-smoked salmon and boils it. She peels some potatoes, puts oolichan grease on a saucer, cleans some green onions, then we wait for the potatoes and fish to be done.

“Lisa,” Aunt Edith says, squeezing my shoulder. “God is with them.”

I nod. After Aunt Edith says grace, I eat all of the salmon on my plate. Mom jarred this fish earlier this summer. Sockeye. She did a good job on the smoking. Aunt Edith and Uncle Geordie went out to the Kemano to catch oolichans and make grease. Mom couldn’t make it this year and I didn’t have the heart to do it. I know Mom was disappointed. She wanted someone in our family to learn to make grease. The grease I’m spreading over the fish we traded with Aunt Edith, her grease for a box of our half-smoked.

Oolichan grease is a delicacy that you have to grow up eating to love. Silvery, slender oolichans are about as long as your hand and a little thicker than your thumb. They are part of the smelt family and are one of the tastiest fish on the planet. Cooking oolichans can be as simple as broiling them in the oven until they’re singed—which is heavenly but very smelly, and hard on your ears if you have a noisy smoke alarm—or as touchy and complicated as rendering oil from them to make a concoction called grease. Oolichans can also be dried, smoked, sun-dried, salted, boiled, canned, frozen, but they are tastiest fresh. The best way to eat fresh oolichans is to run them through with a stick and roast them over an open fire like wieners, then eat them while they’re sizzling hot and dripping down your fingers.

Because of their high oil content, oolichans go rancid easily and don’t last in the fridge or freezer. If you want the taste of oolichan all year round, you have to make them into grease. To do this, you have to catch a suitable number of fat, juicy oolichans. Then the fish must be aged properly, for one to two weeks, in a large pit. Two things must be kept in mind when aging the fish: first, the longer the fish is aged, the stronger the taste of the grease, and secondly, weather conditions affect the ripening process. Only the most experienced grease makers should decide when the oolichans are ripe enough to be transformed into grease.

Fill a large metal boiler with water. Light the fire pit beneath the boiler and bring the water to a boil. Then add the ripened oolichans and stir slowly until cooked (they will float slightly off the bottom). Bring the water to a boil again and mash the fish into small pieces to release the oil from the flesh. A layer of clear oil will form on the surface. Scrape out the fire pit and keep the boiler covered. Let simmer, but, before the water cools completely, use a wooden board to gently push the layer of oil to one end of the boiler and scoop it into another vat. With a quick, spiraling motion, add two or three red-hot rocks from an open fire to the vat of oil, which will catch fire and boil. Once the oil has cooled, do a final straining to remove small twigs, water and scales. Put oil in jars. Keep your fresh oolichan grease refrigerated to prevent it from going bad.

Oolichan grease is versatile. Most people use it as a sauce—a tablespoon or two is drizzled over cooked fish or added to stews or soups for instant flavour. Some people prefer to use grease to combat cold symptoms
and to boost their general health. A mere teaspoon a day is enough to keep you regular and in top physical condition. When spread on the skin, grease is an expensive, fragrant and highly effective moisturizer. In olden days, grease was also used to preserve berries, fruit or meat.

“Are you going to finish that?” Aunt Edith says.

“Oh,” I say. I stop stirring my potatoes. They’re a fine mush now. “No, thanks.”

“Lisa,” she says. “Go to bed.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ll pray for you and for your brother.”

“Thanks,” I say. “For everything.”

I scrape the leftovers into the garbage, put the plate into the sink and go upstairs to my bedroom. I stop at my door and stare down the hallway. Jimmy’s door is closed. I know he hates people to go in there without his permission, but I can’t help myself. The door squeaks a bit, the hinge needs adjusting and a little oil.

His room is compulsively neat. From the size-organized paper clips on his desk to the colour-arranged clothes in his closet, you can tell he knows where every single thing in this room is. I touch the picture of Karaoke. He took it when she wasn’t looking, as she examined a bouquet of magenta fireweed.

“Why’d you put that picture up?” she’d said, frowning.

“I like it,” he’d said.

“I don’t. If you want to remember me looking for bugs, go right ahead,” she’d said.

She’s like me, not much of a romantic. I’m surprised at Jimmy. I would never have pegged him for a
sentimentalist. Everything in his life has been so … utilitarian. Is that the right word? I don’t know. His life has been focused so tightly that I made the unflattering assumption that Karaoke was a substitute for swimming. She didn’t seem his type. Even the most aggressive of his girlfriends up to that point had been bunny rabbits compared with Karaoke. As Uncle Mick would ironically have said, she is a delicate Haisla flower. I wonder what they said to each other when they first met. From what I can squeeze out of Jimmy, I take it they were introduced by Jack Daniel’s.

Karaoke’s picture is over the place where one of his first national awards rested. In the morning light, you can see the slightly darker outlines on the walls of his swimming medals and trophies, the ghostly imprints of his accomplishments. He took them down in early summer. They’re packed in four boxes and tucked somewhere in the attic.

Dinner’s resting uneasily in my stomach. Or I’ve had too many cigarettes. Either way, I have to stay sitting up because when I try to lie down, acid burns up my throat. From his bed, I can see Canoe Mountain. Jimmy’s room is on the other end of the house from mine, and you can’t see down the channel as well because the greengage tree is nearer to his window. He has a wonderful view of the Alcan docks, though. And the place Ma-ma-oo pointed out, the canoe shape in the mountain across the channel. She said that when the sun touched the bow, you knew the oolichans would be here. Bears woke up and eagles gathered with seagulls and crows and ravens, waiting anxiously at the rivers. Seals bobbed hopefully in the water and killer
whales followed the seals. The people who still made grease started building wooden fermenting boxes and tuning in to the weather network, watching for gales and storm warnings that might delay the start of oolichan fishing.

The day Mick and I left for Kemano, the sky was low and grey, snow compressed into ice and covered by knee-deep puddles and slush. Ma-ma-oo used to say winter loved Kitamaat so much that he didn’t want to leave. He gave up only when the oolichans came, and then he packed reluctantly, grumbling and cranky. On
wa-mux-a
, the day winter shook out his cape, the snow fell in big flakes, but later the sun came out and melted them all away; that was winter going home.

I had kept Mom and Dad up almost all night. I was so excited at the idea of having an adventure with Uncle Mick that I couldn’t sit still. I packed and repacked and hunted through the whole house for things I thought I might need on our trip to Kemano. We were going to make grease with Uncle Geordie and Aunt Edith, who would be following later in the day in Geordie’s troller. Mom was catching a ride with them and when Mick asked if they needed help, Mom gratefully said he could get me out of her hair while they were getting ready. Dad and Jimmy were going to Terrace for a swim meet. I thought they were nuts to give up a fishing trip just to go splash around some dumb swimming pool.

I bounced out of bed at exactly 4 a.m., raced down the hallway to the master bedroom and shook Mom until she blearily told me that she still had a half-hour left before she had to get up.

“You are out of my will,” Mom muttered, slowly rolling out of bed.

She drove me to the docks, where the water was as flat as paper and the first light made the sky a receding grey. Even through the layers of clothes Mom had stuffed me in, the morning air had a keen, curt bite. We waited five minutes for Mick to show up. Mom spent the time smearing my face with sunscreen and threatening me with untimely death if I took off my baseball cap.

“I’m not going to spend the week listening to you gripe about your sunburn,” she said.

When Mick finally appeared, he clunked along the gangplank carrying his backpack. The feeling of everything moving too slowly became overwhelming, and I had to bounce. Mom hauled me back by the collar and said that if I didn’t behave, I wouldn’t go at all.

“Come on, Monster,” Mick said as he threw the backpack in the middle of the speedboat. “Here,” he said, picking me up, grinning. “You gonna be a good girl?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, go ahead. Be my monster.” He noogied my head.

“Mick,” Mom said in a warning tone. “Don’t encourage her.”

“Can you do a moose call for me?” Mick said, eyes sparkling.

I closed my left nostril with a finger and trumpeted as loudly as I could. When he’d taught me, he’d said that female moose made the sound so that they could have other moose to play with. He laughed and Mom said, “Put Her Royal Highness down and get going.”

He smiled at me. “We used to call her Miss Bossy Pants when she was a kid.”

I giggled.

“Less cute remarks,” Mom said. “More attention to details—like the tide, Mr. Smarty-Pants.”

Mick tossed me up over his head. The world spun, blurred as I twirled, then Mick caught me by the waist and, in one dizzying, swooping movement, lowered me from the dock so I landed in the speedboat with a thump.

He cast off and hopped in the boat, rocking it alarmingly. After he started the motor, he raised one hand and flapped it a few times at Mom, then saluted and yelled, “Red power!”

“Get out of here, you nut,” she said.

Mick pushed us off, as she stood on the docks and watched us. He fired off the engine. We started off sedately, but once we rounded the breakwater and the point, and were firmly out of her view, he gunned the motor, the bow lifted like a ramp, spray kicked up three feet high behind us and we tore across the water.

Behind us, the village, the road to town, the hazy plumes of smoke and the bright orange lights of Alcan shrank away. Ahead of us, the mountains stretched along the sides of the channel. As we rode near the Kildala Valley, I felt a sudden chill. A white man and his son, in matching neon green and black scuba gear, stood on a point, waving to us. I stood up and waved back wildly.

“Who are you waving at?” Mick shouted over the engine. He was looking at me like I was nuts.

“You can’t see them?” I said, lowering my arm.

“Who?” He looked back at the shoreline.

“They’re right there,” I said, pointing. “On the beach.”

Mick craned his head and squinted. “I don’t see anyone.”

The man turned and walked into the woods. The son—I don’t know how I knew he was the son—stopped waving too, but stayed and watched us. He seemed so lonely that I took off my cap and waved it in the air to make him smile. He stayed on the beach until we were out of sight.

The Kemano was a half-day away on a fast speedboat. About three of the rivers in Kitamaat territory have reliable oolichan runs—the Kitimat, Kitlope and Kemano rivers. Like salmon, oolichans spawn in rivers and their fry migrate to the ocean, where they live for about three years. They return to their home rivers along the British Columbian coast in early spring, usually between mid-February and early April. The Kitimat River used to be the best one, but it has been polluted by all the industry in town, so you’d have to be pretty dense or desperate to eat anything from that river. Mom said the runs used to be so thick, you could walk across the river and not touch water. You didn’t even need a net; you could just scoop them up with your hat. Most people go out to the Kemano and the Kitlope these days, but you have to pay for gas, and you need a decent boat and have to be able to spend a few weeks out there if you want to make grease. If you have a job, it’s hard to get enough time off work. Oolichans spawn in only a small number of rivers in B.C., so the Haisla used to trade them
with other villages for things that were rare in our area, like soapberries. In the past, most of the groups spoke different languages, so a trade language called Chinook was created, which combined the easiest-to-pronounce words in the languages into a pidgin, a patois. Oolichan is the Chinook word for the fish, but in Haisla they’re called
jak’un
.