Monkey Beach (25 page)

Dad made French toast for breakfast. Jimmy eyed Tab then nodded when she sat beside him. Her mouth quirked.

“Hey, Jimmy.”

“Hi,” he said.

“Are you kids going up to the rec centre for Santa—”

“Aw, Dad,” Jimmy said. “We’re not babies any more.”

“We’re going,” Tab said.

“We are?” I said.

She smiled. “We can’t miss free candy.”

We hung around the house until it was time to go.
Santa Night is usually the choir singing a few carols, the little kids doing skits, while other kids run around like crazy until the finale, when Santa arrives and gives out bags of candy. As we walked into the gym, we saw Erica already entrenched in the back bleachers with her gang. They stopped talking when we came into the gym, stared at us, and then started snickering.

“Wow,” Erica said just loud enough for us to hear. “It’s the queens of the Kmart set.”

“You want a doobie?” Tab said. “I could sure use one.”

I nervously followed Tab outside to the back of the rec centre and across a ditch to the elementary school. We sat in the swings. Tab pulled out two joints and handed me one. Tab put her joint to her mouth and hunched over to hide it. “Wanesica,” she said, lighting up.

I copied her, hunched so far over that my head almost touched my knees. The stuff tasted as good as skunk cabbage smelled, was harsh and scratchy on my throat, and I ended up coughing most of it out. Tab grinned at me and hit my back. “Don’t fucking waste it, man. That’s five bucks a pop.”

“This tastes like shit.”

“You’re welcome.”

I managed half a joint then coughed so hard I got a headache. My fingers were numb from the cold by the time Tab finished hers. Tension eased out of my body. I started to smile. Tab watched me, smug. Her eyes were bright red. I giggled. “Tabby the red-eyed reindeer had a very shiny eeeeeeye, and if you ever saw it, saw it, you would even laugh and dieeee.”

“Jeez, you’re a cheap date,” she said, leaning back.

“Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say, Tabby, with your eyes so bright, won’t you light my doobie tonight?”

I went on until she smacked me on the side of the head. I could feel the hit ripple through my brain. I closed my eyes to feel it better, swaying. When I opened them, Tab was biting her lip in worry. “You okay?” She shook her head sadly. “I think you should stick to sugar rushes.”

“Ah, relax.” Swaying hard, I felt like I was moving through water, moving in slow motion, like I was Jamie Summers, the Bionic Woman, getting ready to kick some bad-guy butt.

“Cut it out.” Tab looked around nervously. “You are embarrassing.”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s what family’s for.”

“Jesus.” She handed me her bottle of eye drops. “You really are nuts.”

I kicked the ground with the toe of my runner. It squeaked. “I missed you too.”

“Lean back and put this in your eye. Yeah, like that. Now the other. Come on, hurry up or your parents will skin me alive.”

I handed the bottle back to her. “We don’t have to go home. We could go over to Frank’s. Pooch and Cheese—”

“You’re hanging out with them?” she said incredulously.

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“Jeez, you’ve got more guts than brains, that’s for sure.”

“They’re my friends.”

She shook her head. “Frank’s okay. Pooch is weird. Cheese is a pervert.”

“He is not!”

“You remember when all those panties went missing from the clotheslines? That was Cheese and his retarded brother.”

“Yeah? Who said?”

“People.”

“I don’t listen to gossip,” I said piously.

She snorted. “Mm-hmm. And I just say no to drugs.”

We ended up going home because it got cold enough for the channel to steam. When the ocean temperature is higher than the air, steam swirls above the waves. The colder it is, the higher the steam rises. I stopped to watch the pale, twisting forms strain to reach the darkening sky. They were so tall, they looked like the ghosts of trees.

I had watched a video in geography class about Siberia. In this one place, it drops so far below freezing, the rubber on the soles of your running shoes cracks when you step outside. As soon as a breath leaves your body, the vapour in it crystallizes, then tinkles as it drifts to the ground. The people there call that sound the music of your soul. Tab tugged on my arm and said if we stayed outside any longer, her tits were going to fall off.

Dad was too busy talking on the phone to hear us coming in, but when we closed the door he looked over, his face red.

“Tab, it’s your mother.” He said. He held out the phone for her.

As her mother screamed into the phone, Tab gave me a cynical smile, then ducked her head and played with the fringes on her jacket.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Oh, besides the fact that Tab hitchhiked up here without telling her mother where she was going, nothing,” Dad said.

After five minutes, Tab laid the phone on the table. She left the kitchen and went upstairs without looking at either of us. Dad picked up the receiver, listened for a while, then softly told Aunt Trudy to phone back when she calmed down.

Tab was packing her things when I came into the bedroom.

“What’re you doing?”

“Brain surgery,” she said.

I sat on the bed and watched her, not knowing what to say. Dad came into the bedroom and watched Tab too. “Lisa, could you leave us alone for a minute?”

I hesitated until he raised his eyebrow and gave me a look.

Mom came home and asked me how Santa Night had gone. I told her about Tab running away from her mother. She sighed and went upstairs. They talked to Tab for about an hour. I made myself a sandwich and gobbled it down. I had some cookies, chips and a banana and was still hungry when my parents brought Tab into the kitchen and told me she would be going home for Christmas. Aunt Trudy had told them that Josh offered to drive her down to make up for “the incident.”

“I’d rather hitch,” Tab said.

“Do you know how dangerous that is?” Mom said. “Do you know what can happen to you?”

Tab laughed bitterly.

“Seriously, Tabitha,” Dad said.

Her lips pulled back into a sneer, but she didn’t say anything else as she turned and went upstairs. I brought her cookies and a banana—peanut butter sandwich. She was curled into herself on my bed. I sat beside her and shook her leg until she sat up and took some cookies.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Okay. You want me to go?”

She managed a smile. “Only if you bring me more cookies.”

“Man, I’m starved too.”

“They’re called the munchies. Haven’t you ever done pot before?”

“Are you kidding? They’d kill me.”

“Yeah. They would.”

She turned to face the wall and wouldn’t respond to my poking except to snap, “Stop it.”

I woke early in the morning. I heard voices drifting up through the register. Josh and Dad were having coffee. Jimmy was feeding the crows and they were squawking excitedly on the porch. In the winter, his flock almost doubled. I flinched from the brightness of the kitchen lights and drowsily poured myself some cereal.

“When you leaving?” I said to Josh.

“Soon as Sleeping Beauty gets out of bed,” he said.

“Oh. Can she stay for a few days, or—”

“Lisa,” Dad said in a warning tone.

“It’s not fair.”

“Yeah, life’s a bitch,” Josh said. “The roads are icy from Prince Rupert to Williams Lake. It’ll take us days to get down.”

“You got chains?” Dad asked.

I stirred my cereal around the bowl and listened to them gripe about winter driving. Later, Tab came downstairs with her duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Josh took her bag and walked out to his truck. Tab gave me a hug, then followed him. He opened the car door for her. She got inside and stared straight ahead.

For Christmas I made Ma-ma-oo a coiled pot in art class. When I saw the four gifts under her tree, I wished I’d made her something bigger. Mom and Dad had sat me and Jimmy down at the beginning of December and told us that Christmas was going to be tight. I assumed that everyone was going to have a tight holiday and didn’t think any more about it. I could stay the night because Mom and Dad were going to a Christmas dance.

“Do you go to dances yet?”

“No.”

Ma-ma-oo laughed. “Why not? Don’t you like boys?”

“What was Mimayus like?” I said, hoping to steer her away from this topic.

“Mimayus? My crazy sister,” Ma-ma-oo said. “Oh, she loved to jitterbug. She danced all night long. All the boys wanted to dance with her. She bought the
fanciest underwear. The boys lifted her up and spun her just to see her underwear. That’s why she loved to jitterbug. All the women hated her, she was so pretty. You look just like her. You have her eyes.”

I was left speechless at this declaration. I started to blush, not used to having people call me pretty. “Do you still know how to jitterbug?”

She smiled. “Yes. Want me to teach you?”

“How come you don’t go to dances?”

Her face cracked wide open as she laughed. “Been a long time since I did anything worth gossiping about.”

“Who gossiped about you?”

“Oh, everyone.”

“Really?”

“I wasn’t always old.”

“What did you do?”

“Cookie?” She handed me an Oreo. “Did I ever tell you about shape-shifters?”

I knew it was a distraction, but I said, “No.”

In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love
and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.

The old stories, she explained, were less raunchy than they used to be. There was a beautiful woman who was having an affair with her husband’s brother. She and her husband were paddling back to the village after trading their oolichan grease for seaweed. Just off Monkey Beach, they stopped and he pissed over the side of the canoe. She lifted her paddle and clubbed him. While he was in the water, she used the paddle to hold his head under until he was still. Thinking he was dead, she paddled back to the village and told everyone he drowned. But the next day, when the wife and the husband’s brother went back to hide the body, they found large footprints in the sand. Worried he might be alive, they followed the trail into the woods. They discovered the man—transformed into a b’gwus—who then killed his adulterous wife and brother.

But to really understand the old stories, she said, you had to speak Haisla. She would tell me a new Haisla word a day, and I’d memorize it. But, I thought dejectedly, even at one word a day, that was only 365 words a year, so I’d be an old woman by the time I could put sentences together.

Two days before Christmas, we finally got around to getting the tree. Dad asked me if I wanted to come and help him pick one up from Overwaitea. I was almost going to say no. When we stood in the parking lot, he looked bewildered at the selection of bundled trees
leaning against the wall. I wanted to be out of there as soon as possible, so I grabbed a small spruce. We set it up in the living room in the opposite corner from where it normally sat. Mom took out the decorations and threw them on in five minutes. Then we all ignored it.