Bone Dance (7 page)

“Peter,” she whispered, turning her face away, “why don't you just grow up?”

In her dreams she searched beyond concrete and city noise and chalk-smelling school corridors, beyond weekends during which her arms ached from her parttime job at Cuppa Java, beyond history and English and chemistry tests, all requiring at least a
B
. She managed an
A
in two and scraped up a
B
in chemistry.

She went to bed earlier and earlier. Made her room a sanctuary. Burned sage and sweetgrass on a clamshell, lit candles. She meditated from the womb of her bed, pressing past ceiling to stars, trying to find her way. And then she slept the clock around and dreamed.

Out of the hill pokes tree branches and rocks and shiny tin cans, and her father's shirts like fluttering flags and all of his money. His pile of possessions keeps growing. They are an eyesore. They are a blot on the landscape. Grandpa, bent over, carefully shovels them over in the earth, mounding them into the hill. He straightens up, leans on his shovel, wipes tears from his eyes. More tears keep coming. He's watching someone who is running down the hill. And then she knows, even as she's dreaming, that she is the one who is running away. Running and running. “Stop!” cries the raven, flying at her back. “Turn around and face the mystery.”

Auntie Francine, the family tea-leaf reader, unwittingly came the closest to guessing about her dreams and waking visions one Sunday evening.

She stared into Alex's porcelain cup, cradled like a half-moon between her hands. “I see a disconnection,” she said, studying the pattern in the leaves, “between your head and your body.”

“Where? I don't see it,” said Alex.

“Right there.” Francine's thin finger pointed.

Alex peered at something that, to her, resembled a crow flying off a leafy tree in search of something. Then she thought, No, it's not a crow. It's a raven. It's a big raven. It's a raven transformed. From something. Changing shape. Shape from an old man. Old Raven Man.

“Your dreams,” Francine primly advised, looking up, “are trying to tell you something.”

Alex's heart caught in her throat. She hadn't mentioned
a thing to anybody about her dreams. And now she felt her whole body flush hotly. “I don't know,” she said carefully, “what you are talking about.”

“Why haven't you been out to see Earl McKay's property yet? Don't look at me that way. The cat's been out of the bag for quite some time. You'll find land,” her aunt persisted. “And, apparently, a cabin.” Reaching across the table, she took a firm grip on Alex's hand. “Listen. Those little letters you've been holding on to for so long aren't him. But what he's left you is something real and solid. That's the important thing. Aren't you even a bit excited over this? Little bug?”

Francine hadn't called her little bug for years. The sound of it, popping up like an old and long-lost friend, made her sit there wanting to stay proud while tears poured down her cheeks.

“You're a normal girl,” Francine added softly. “You should be happy about such a gift.”

“Why…?” Alex wiped her tears away. More kept coming.

“What? Spit it out.”

“Didn't he leave
anything
… to her? She's the one who took care of me. Paid all the bills. Did whatever she had to. And I know Grandpa helped a lot. So did you. But she was the one.…”

Now she was bawling. She wanted to stop. She couldn't.

Francine pulled up her chair and rocked Alex in her arms. “She's very happy for you,” she said carefully. “You know that. All her life she's worked hard. And
now she's built up her little accounting business, and she's happy. And she wants you to be happy, too. She wants you to live a normal life.”

Alex pictured her intestines at this very moment. They were snarled and knotted and begging for mercy. What did Francine mean,
normal
? Was her father crazy? Was that why he ran off? Was she going crazy, too?

Behind them, the kitchen faucet dripped slowly. Each drop drummed into the sink. She could hear the swelling majesty of powwow drums as her heart broke again and again.

Serena's dad had, for the third time in the past two years, walked out on her mother. This time they all thought it was for good. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, apparently, was standing in her nightgown by the fish tank, sobbing inconsolably over their seven-year-old goldfish Fillet, who had, coincidentally, just died of dropsy.

“We gave him antibiotics and everything, but he died anyway. It is so gross,” Serena said over the phone to Alex. “All bloated and bloody. Nobody wants to touch him.”

This was her way of saying she was in pain. A family crisis to override any pain she had caused Alex over the past three and a half weeks.

“I'll be there as soon as I can,” Alex told her.

It was the only day she had to register at the University of Manitoba. Accessing the registry system took an hour. Then it took forever to get her courses. But if you hung up the phone you were dead, so you had to stay on the line. In the end, she got most of the ones she wanted, with a couple of compromises. Three
hours later she was finally able to go over to the Fitzpatricks' and deal with the fish, which looked as if it had exploded.

She made Serena toast and scrambled eggs with cheese and jalapeño peppers and brought it to her in her pink room, where they sat under her wonderful hanging frog.

“This is so nice of you,” Serena said, her lower lip trembling. She picked away at the eggs, put down her fork, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed. And then, “Peter just broke up with me,” she said finally. “I've tried and tried with him. I don't understand. I don't know why he doesn't love me.”

When Pop, with sad pouchy eyes, finally got around to telling him, four months after the fact, that Earl had left the LaFrenière homestead to his daughter, two things happened.

One, he wanted Pop, for Pop's sake, to try to buy back the property.

“We could afford it,” said Lonny. “Things aren't so bad now.”

“Pretty soon you're graduating from high school,” Pop said quietly, nodding his shaggy head. “It's less than a month away. Don't you have any plans?”

Here it was again, guilt money, and the guilt not even intended. “I'm going to stay out a year and work,” said Lonny. “I'd rather do that. Really I would. I just don't know what I want. Not yet. You'd be wasting your money, Pop.”

“But the money's there now,” said Pop with a sidelong look, his eyes veiled with sadness, “and you're so smart.” He rubbed the back of his big wrinkled neck and added, “And what's done is
done. The land is sold. Won't you take this opportunity?”

“Pop,” said Lonny softly, “you can't keep living your life for me.”

“Who says I can't?” Pop gave him a quick bonerattling hug.

It was so depressing. Pop was forty-eight years old. Working in a lumber store. Living in a crappy little house on a crappy little piece of land. He has no life, Lonny thought, and he deserves so much more.

Later, feeling off-balance and ill, he got in the truck and drove off in the dust over to Robert Lang's place. It was a night of long twilight at the end of May. The two of them wheeled through the blue shadows into town and got a twelve-pack of beer and a Jack Daniel's and a large bottle of cola. They parked by the lake, near the old dance pavilion, and proceeded, quietly, to get very drunk.

By around two in the morning, the moon hung over the water, and the sky was draped with the darkest blue. Robert slid down beside the truck, his knees poking up in the air, his hand fanning away a swarm of fish flies. “I got this memory that's been doggin' my ass ever since we were little kids,” he said. “Remember that time, Lon, when you and me dug up that old mound?”

“Yes,” said Lonny.

“Found those bones,” Robert went on. “Damn, that was scary. You ever think about that?”

“Yes.”

Robert nodded his head drunkenly and poured some
more Jack Daniel's into their cola bottle. “Wondered about that, with your Native ancestry and all. Been giving it some serious thought lately. Me and Charlene had a big long talk about your ancestry. And other stuff.”

“You. And Charlene.”

“Yep,” he said, pointing up at the Milky Way. “She's into some very interesting stuff. She claims that those buggers up there see everything we do.”

“What buggers?”

“The stars in the cosmos and shit. Look at them, man. They're
cooold.”
He took a swig from the plastic soda bottle.

Lonny took the bottle from Robert. “Know who owns the LaFrenière land now? Earl's daughter. City girl. Lives in Winnipeg.” He let the cola and Jack Daniel's slide and sting down his throat.

“His daughter.” Robert nodded his head in a stunned way. And then, for quite a while, they listened to the lake slap and sigh along the shore. “So,” he said quietly, “she's the one who's going to end up with the land that was supposed to be yours.”

“Who cares,” said Lonny grimly.

But that was a lie. The stars knew he was lying. They shone down colder than ever. And beside Robert, his best friend ever since childhood, he felt the loneliness of that lie.

By morning they'd moved down to the lake shore and were sprawled asleep on old blankets in the sand. Robert, who was the first to stir, shivered in the misty early morning chill and poked at Lonny.

“A raven took my T-shirt,” said Robert.

“Bull!” Lonny sat up, giggling. He pulled on his cowboy boots and then tried to stand. He was still a little drunk.

“I'm not kidding.” Robert grinned, looking at him with red puffy eyes. “Great big old raven stole my shirt. He was watching me, I swear. And then I catch him out of the corner of my eye. He's picking it up in his beak. And he flaps off with it. Bugger.”

Lonny fell back in the sand and laughed some more.

“Robert,” he said, patting his friend's back. “Don't tell me you're getting into some weird shit. Let's buy you a cup of coffee, man, and sober you up. Then we've got to get home. Pop's likely going crazy by now, wondering where I am.”

They went into Deena's Deli and ordered two cups of coffee and a couple of burgers to go. They stood waiting by the big front window. The door swung open and shut, open and shut. The place was busier than usual, but Deena, her wild blond hair flying, her skinny hips held skinnier by faded jeans, her long freckled neck gleaming with sweat, came out of the kitchen at the back to deliver their order herself. She placed it on the counter, peered at them through her bangs, and said to Lonny, “Honey, you look a mess. Where have you been sleeping all night?”

“On the beach.” Lonny grinned at his mom's old friend and then at Robert, who was smiling foolishly as Deena leaned over. Her breasts were compact and golden all the way down the front of her navy blue V-necked sweater. “How did you know we didn't go home?”

“I know everything there is to know about you and then some,” she said, easing a couple of napkins into the bag that held their order. “And you didn't call home either.” She raised her eyes, smiled, shook her head. “He called not more than five minutes ago. Looking for you. You want me to tell him you're on your way?”

“It's okay, Deena,” Lonny said, chuckling. “We'll be home before you know it.”

The day of his mom's funeral, it had been Deena who had comforted him, back home, as Pop lay in his room on the bed that he and Lonny's mom had shared for only four years. Pop was inconsolable, so full of grief that he couldn't stand up.

Lonny thought about how he saw Deena practically every other day. But he still couldn't talk to her about his mom. He couldn't because Deena carried her grief around, wore it close to the surface. It was visible in the way she wiped off the red-topped tables, her bony shoulder blades moving sharply beneath her thin knitted tops, beneath her honey-colored flesh. It was there, probably, when she groomed her horses, up the road from them, on that little piece of land she had lived on ever since her hippie days. It was there, he could plainly see, in every lonely look she gave to Pop whenever he shyly ordered the daily special.

He thought back to how, in the year following his mom's death, they saw less and less of Deena. And then one September day she'd come riding down the road on her horse. He had been sitting there, chucking rocks into the ditch. Across the way in the wheat field,
Pop was combining, sitting high in the air-conditioned cab, his total attention on getting another crop off the land before freeze-up.

It was Saturday. Lonny was supposed to be out on the land, helping. But when he wouldn't, Pop swore under his breath and left him lying facedown in bed, inhaling the smell of sour sheets.

Deena slid off her horse and left the animal to wander down and graze in the ditch. Lonny continued to chuck stones. He didn't even want to see her. That's how bad he felt. Maybe she'll go away, he thought. She's stupid, just stupid.

But she sat down in the grass beside him, her hands on her knees. “I'm sorry I haven't been around,” she said. “I've been really busy.”

Yeah, right, he thought. Liar, you big liar.

And then she said, “I miss her, too.”

She moved closer. He felt her gently tug on the elastic that held back his hair until it was free, blowing in the hot prairie wind. He could smell an earthy perfume rising off her skin. She combed her fingers through his hair, her nails raking his scalp in a soothing way, and then she tied it back again.

“Your mom always liked you to wear your hair this way,” she said.

“Robert,” he told her, “that first day I met him? He was standing at the drinking fountain, and he told me I was an Indian.”

Deena laughed. She had a wonderful warm musical laugh. “That's obvious,” she said. “What did
you
say?”