Monkey Beach (7 page)

That was the summer Jimmy found his calling. Even though he was scared to run home alone in the darkness, and was still pissing his bed because he was too afraid to go to the bathroom in case the monsters hiding underneath grabbed him, he decided what he was going to do for the rest of his life. We were watching a documentary about the Moscow Olympics on TV. A Canadian swimmer came in second doing the butterfly stroke. As the guy was standing on the podium, Jimmy said, “I’m going to get a gold.”

I think my reaction was, “Yeah, yeah. Shut up and watch TV.”

He pushed some kitchen chairs together later that night and stood on the one in the centre, handing himself foil-wrapped chocolate coins. I booed and made farting noises. Ignoring me, he waved to imaginary fans, sang himself “O Canada,” then ate his gold medal.

Jimmy got his first bike three months after me. He turned to me and stuck out his tongue. “You can’t even ride yours.”

“Can so,” I said.

“Can’t. Bet you I can ride mine tomorrow.”

“Enough,” Dad said. They disappeared to the back of the house for Dad to adjust Jimmy’s banana seat and oil the chain.

I was so pissed off that I decided to learn how to ride my bike right then and there. I dragged it out of the garage and pushed it out of sight of our house.

When I sat on it and tried to pedal, I tilted over. I couldn’t get my balance. The afternoon sped by as I pictured Jimmy circling me on his bike, snickering. I finally got my balance, but I couldn’t keep it when I started pedaling. It dawned on me that if I was on a hill, I could balance and roll at the same time. I was going to try it on a small hill first, but then decided that a big hill would be better.

I went to the top of Council Hill, which slants as steep as a roller-coaster ride. I balanced, then pushed myself over. The bike went so fast that the handlebars started to shake. I put on the brakes, hard, and my bike flipped over. I crashed near the big tree that marks the halfway point of the hill. My bike lay with both tires spinning crazily. I got up and felt blood leak down my knee where the skin was scraped open.

Damned if Jimmy was going to lord it over me for the rest of eternity. It was embarrassing enough that he could swim, dive and snorkel while I was still dog-paddling in the shallow end. I picked up my bike and got back on it. I pushed off and flew down the hill. At the bottom of Council Hill there is a four-way stop. The trees blocked my view, so I never saw the truck coming until it honked.

I zipped through the stop, heart thudding as the truck swooshed by me. I tried to pedal, but the bike was going so fast that the chain just ran loose. My hair whipped behind me and my skin tingled. As the bike slowed, I tried to pedal again. The chain caught and I was biking.

The truckdriver turned out to be Uncle Geordie, who drove around until he found me, made me get off my bike, threw it in his truck and drove me home. Dad confiscated my bike and we went to Emergency, even though I kept telling everybody I was fine.

Jimmy got training wheels and didn’t learn to bike without them for another four months, but I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike for two weeks. I gloated as much as I could, but Jimmy spoiled it by pointing out that half of my face looked like a pizza. The scars are still there, but you can’t see them until I get tanned, and then they stand out like freckles.

My wounds were still oozing and raw three days later when Mom said I wasn’t grounded any more, and I decided to go spend the day at my cousin Tab’s. Her house was only a few years old, but it already looked run-down. The walls had punched-out holes and the carpet was grey and cigarette-burnt. Her room was in an unfinished basement and never seemed to get warm. I liked going over to Tab’s house because her mother didn’t act like I was going to break something or watch me nervously like Aunt Kate when Erica had the gang over.

No one ever came down to the basement, so we had complete privacy. As a change from playing cards, which I usually lost, I brought Tab
True Stories
and we
read “In Love with a Felon,” about a woman who eventually married the burglar that had kidnapped her.

“Holy, what a dummy,” Tab said. “Why didn’t she just turn him in?”

“She was in love,” I said. “Didn’t you read that part?”

“She was a horny slut,” Tab said.

I sucked in a breath, shocked, thrilled. Mom would never let me get away with swearing the way Tab’s did. But Gertrude, Tab’s mother, wasn’t anything like mine. Dad said that even when they were kids he never called his sister Gertrude, because if you did, she would backslap you into next week. She hadn’t officially changed her name to Trudy, but if you were smart you didn’t call her anything else. We could hear her vomiting in the upstairs bathroom, then clomping down the stairs to Tab’s room, hungover and cranky, she sent me home, saying I could damn well eat out someone else’s fridge.

Mick had moved into an apartment near the City Centre Mall. Mom and Dad were going to Terrace for a wedding, and since most of the people in the village were going too, Mick was the only baby-sitter she could find. Mom told me to be on my best behaviour. She didn’t tell Jimmy to behave himself, but he sat quietly on Uncle Mick’s sofa.

Uncle Mick’s apartment was large but almost empty. He had a TV, a battered plaid sofa that smelled mouldy, a kitchen table with some crates in place of a missing leg, a mattress on the floor and a dresser with all the knobs broken off. The only new thing was an eight-track, which would have been great if he’d played
anything but Elvis. Later, Dad told me Mick was very happy I’d been named after the King’s daughter, but disappointed that they hadn’t named Jimmy Elvis, or at the very least, Presley.

“Elvis Hill,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.

Mick was on workman’s comp that summer. There’d been an accident out in the logging camp, and he’d been knocked over by a truck. He moved slow, as if he were an old man. He made us Kraft Dinner with wieners and some grape Kool-Aid. Then he retreated to his bedroom, poking his head out once in a while to see what we were up to. Jimmy was happy to have a TV all to himself and he could watch forever. I went and knocked on Mick’s door.

“What’s up?” he said, pushing himself onto his elbows.

I carefully sat on the edge of his mattress. He winced when it wobbled. I paused for a moment, knowing Mom would say I was being rude.

“What?” he said.

“Did you really get shot?” I said.

He smiled, but only one side of his mouth turned up. “Yeah.”

“Did it hurt? Did you cry?”

“You betcha.”

“Who shot you? Did you shoot him back? How come you went to jail?”

He closed his eyes and eased himself back down onto his mattress. “Do me a big favour. Go get me a glass of water, okay?”

None of his dishes were clean so I had to rinse out a glass. He thanked me when I handed him the water.
He took out a plastic bottle and shook out two large orange pills with one hand, then popped them into his mouth. “Listen, if I fall asleep, you go and watch Jimmy. If anything happens, you take care of him first, you hear?”

I nodded.

“Good girl,” he said. “I owe you one. Why don’t you go watch TV? Good girl. Go watch TV.”

I waited patiently, but then his eyes started drifting shut. “Uncle Mick?”

He blinked hard and stared at me. “What?”

“Who shot you?”

“It’s a long story, all grown-up and silly.”

“I like stories.”

“You do, huh?” He grimaced as he shifted his pillow under his neck. “Well, about the time you were born, I was on a reserve called Rosebud having tea with a very nice old woman. She was a few years older than your Ma-ma-oo and some people were doing things she didn’t like—”

“What people? Were they drug dealers?”

“No, no. They were Goons.”

“Why were they called Goons?”

“Guardians of the Oglala Nation. Goons. That’s what they were. Big, old goons.” He crossed his eyes and let his tongue roll out of his mouth. I laughed. Then he added lightly, “This old lady had told the police about what the Goons were doing and the police had told the Goons what she said, and so the Goons came over to her house while we were having tea and they shot at us.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because the world is a fucked-up, amoral—” He paused, scratched his nose. “They were trying to scare her into shutting up.”

“Did she shut up?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Did you like that story? Kind of a shitty ending, huh?” He sounded tired. I touched his arm. “That’s okay. I liked it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Dad puts sound effects in his stories but Ma-ma-oo says you shouldn’t put them in just to make it exciting. But if you got guns in your story, and you got shot, maybe you can go
bam! bam!
And go like this—” I clutched my side and hollered, then fell to the floor and rolled around in mock agony.

Mick’s bewildered expression stopped me. “I guess that was too exciting,” I said meekly. “Mom says I should learn when to be quiet. I’ll check on Jimmy now.”

I shook Mick awake a half-hour before Dad and Mom came back. He was finishing his first coffee when they walked in. Dad tried to pay Mick for baby-sitting us, but he wouldn’t take any money. The next day, Dad bought him a mattress and bedframe. Mick told him to take it back. Dad set it up in the bedroom while his brother stood in the doorway and I told him how many teeth I had left. I counted them for him, and Mick patted my head. “Good, good. Al, come on, man. I have a mattress.”

“Now you have a better one,” Dad said.

“I don’t even know how long I’m going to stay here. Why should I get good furniture if I—”

“Bank of Al, remember?”

One of Dad’s cousins had died a year earlier and we were invited to the settlement feast. The day before the event, all the women in the family had had to help do the cooking. We went over to Aunt Kate’s because she had the biggest kitchen. I’d peeled carrots while Erica had peeled potatoes because she could peel vegetables better.

The day of the feast, Dad and Jimmy went to Terrace for one of Jimmy’s first swim meets. I complained about this while I was being physically forced into a pink dress that was too tight around my chest and fluffed out like a duster around my legs. As Mom scraped my hair back into a bun and secured it at the top of my neck, she said that they wouldn’t be getting out of it either, they’d join us as soon as they got back. Then she muttered under her breath that she’d kill Dad if she caught him watching hockey. I had to wear black patents that pinched. I snuck my Pac-Man game into my knapsack because anything you had to dress up for couldn’t be fun.

The rec centre was decorated with cedar boughs. The tables were lined up in rows across the gym. We sat with Aunt Trudy in the corner, near the basketball hoops. The invitation said the feast would start at 6 p.m., but everyone knows that these things always start about a half-hour later than the time specified. That gives everyone time to mingle and check out what everyone else is wearing or talk about the people who
didn’t show up. Or, if they’re far enough out of hearing range, the people who did show up.

“Lordy,” Mom said.

I turned in my seat in time to catch Mick swaggering through the front doors.

Mom and Aunt Trudy exchanged glances and Trudy said, “All he needs is a black hat with a feather.”

For work, Uncle Mick wore his plaid shirt and rubber boots. On hot days, he wore his message T-shirts: Free Leonard Peltier! or Columbus: 500 Years of Genocide and Counting. Usually, he wore a Levi jacket with Trail of Broken Treaties embroidered in bright red thread on the back. For this feast, he’d changed into his buckskin jacket with fringe, his A.I.M. Higher—Join the American Indian Movement! T-shirt and his least ratty pair of jeans. He spotted us and let out a moose call. Mom cringed. Conversations stopped and people turned to watch my uncle as he came over to our table. When I sat in his lap, he let me play with the claw that dangled from his bone choker. He wore it all the time, along with an earring of a silver feather.

Mom had her everyday earrings—the ones with two delicate gold coins, the tiny carved ravens, or the gold nuggets—and her special jewellery that was kept in a small safe in the basement. I liked those the best—a gold brooch of a raven clutching a fiery opal, a necklace of real pearls. For the feast, she was wearing her two-inch, 22-K gold bracelet, carved by a famous artist that she was careful not to name unless asked, so that people wouldn’t think she was bragging. She bought me dainty, dime-sized earrings and elegant
bracelets and brooches. I found them boring. I went for the earrings that dangled to my shoulders, or jingled and sparkled when I walked.

I saw some of my friends and Mom waved me away to play with them, firmly in a conversation with Aunt Trudy about Stanley’s open-heart surgery, while Mick flirted with some women I didn’t know. Erica didn’t leave her table. She sat there the whole time with her hands neatly folded in her lap, waiting patiently. I couldn’t believe anybody was buying her goody-two-shoes act. She was the first girl in our age group to smoke and the first to get a hickey.

Ma-ma-oo entered the gym wearing a black sweater. I called to her and ran back to our table and pulled out a chair for her. As soon as she saw Aunt Trudy, Ma-ma-oo’s wide smile hardened into falseness. She sat stiffly in her chair. “Trudy,” she said.