Born with a Tooth (14 page)

At home Sylvina plays with her two little girls. Theresa, who is eight, gets sullen and quiet when Sylvina pays too much attention to her two-year-old sister, Peneshish, so Sylvina is careful to chase Theresa more through the house, pretend not to see her crouching behind the coats in the closet when they play hide-and-seek. Both girls are happy for this surprise attention their mother gives them. Peneshish laughs and runs clumsily through the house, not grasping the game, just its essence.

Peneshish
is Cree for “bird,” a name Sylvina and her husband decided on one evening shortly after their daughter's birth. They both liked the idea very much of giving her something from the past, of grounding her in a better time. Sylvina married her husband too young. By the time she was eighteen she realized the immensity of her mistake. She didn't even love him. Years went by, were swallowed up by aimlessness. Her late teens and early twenties, gone. What everyone else claimed were the best years of their lives, Sylvina spent with him. So she got pregnant, had Theresa, figured the child would make up for some of it. Then cocaine came to the reserve. At least, the first coke Sylvina had ever seen. And that helped things for a while, especially since her husband became such a wiz when it came to getting the stuff way up here. They had both been doing a lot of it when Sylvina got pregnant the second time, cocaine cut so many times that her nose would run blood. When the doctor warned Sylvina that her baby would die or be born brain-damaged, she managed to quit it all by the end of the first trimester. Her man couldn't. Instead he began doing her share too. Peneshish came out fine, but
small. Still, Sylvina worries all the time now because Peneshish won't talk, or can't. Sylvina's mother has taken to calling her
Akakaketoot Peneshish
, Quiet Bird. Sylvina often wonders if her daughter's still tongue is due to the drugs ingested through her cord or if her name beckons old spirits who tell her there's no rush in speaking too soon.

Sylvina makes the children moose-meat shepherd's pie and buys a chocolate cake from the Northern Store. The meal is her husband's favourite, but he doesn't show. Out drinking or working a deal. It's just as well. If he does make it home tonight, he'll be too far gone to try and fuck her. Sylvina doesn't want him inside her. She wants to start things fresh with the pilot. When the girls are in bed, she calls her mother and arranges for her to pick them up from school.

“Why can't you?” her mother asks.

“I can't,” Sylvina says.

“Why not?” her mother asks.

“I just can't,” Sylvina says.

The pilot flies her south, following the river. Up here is dazzling blue. Sylvina can see the curve of the world. The sky is so bright that she puts sunglasses on. The land below is brown and frozen to a rock's hardness. Still no snow. It has become too cold to snow. Sylvina looks down at the river. It looks like a black road, she thinks. Frozen solid. Half a metre thick already. She can see wide pressure cracks running along its surface. The ice makes her think of her daughters, of taking them skating on the bumpy river, skating and skating for kilometres.

It's no good to think of them, so Sylvina takes her mind away by flirting with the pilot, squeezing his thigh so his knee jumps, running her hand up the inside of his leg to settle him.
She leans over and sucks on his earlobe. He acts like it's too much of a disturbance, but she can see by the way he shifts his weight that he's uncomfortably excited.

“Didn't you say once that this plane could practically fly itself?” she asks, kneeling in the little space between her seat and his.

“Sylvina,” he says as she rubs him through his jeans, replacing her hand with her mouth, blowing a rush of hot air through the blue denim. He grips the U of the plane's steering tighter as she unzips and releases him. She takes him into her mouth as they fly over the dams. He moans the dam's presence to her like a faint-hearted tour guide. He cries out somewhere up from South Porcupine and they begin the quick descent to the airfield. Sylvina wants to think of it as a new beginning, but can't.

His house is small and drab. A kitchen, a bedroom, bathroom and damp, cold basement that smells of mould. He lives here, he says, because it's smack dab in between the airport and his favourite strip of bars. The first night home he takes her to a few of them — the Black Steer, Charlie's Roadhouse, the Bulldog. He introduces Sylvina to his best friend, Drew, at the Black Steer. “She's beautiful,” Drew says, knowing she's in earshot. “You got yourself a real little Pocahontas there.” Both men laugh and Sylvina blushes a little, feeling good, even though the compliment was a stupid one. Drew buys them all a round of rye, straight up, chased by gulps of Export.

It's eleven p.m. at the Bulldog and other friends have joined their group of three. All of them are lit up now, everyone shouting around the little tables they've pulled together, swearing and laughing and pushing one another. The men all comment to the pilot how pretty Sylvina is.

“You got a good one, bro,” one says. “Just don't let her have no babies. It'll make her dumpy-looking.” All the men at the table find this very funny, but their pudgy wives and girlfriends push at the men's arms in anger or look down at their glasses of beer. Sylvina knows she is prettier than the other women here. “Exotic-looking,” one woman says. Sylvina likes that.

“The Indian women around here are all fat. And bad complexions,” one woman beside Sylvina says to her friend. Sylvina was introduced to this woman but has forgotten her name. The woman turns to her and says, “Hey, Sylvia, you must be from a different band than the ones around here. They're all dogs, but you're not!”

“Must be,” Sylvina says, excusing herself to the bathroom downstairs in the smoky pub.

She gets a shiver sitting, peeing. The high of a couple of hours ago has turned to full-on drunkenness, and it's easier now to feel the cold of sadness creep in under the stall's half door. For a while there, Sylvina was able to forget the girls. Forgetting her man is no problem, but Sylvina suddenly knows as she pulls up her jeans that there isn't enough beer in South Porcupine to drown her two little ones.

Drew comes out of the men's bathroom just as Sylvina passes it on her way upstairs to the noise and smoke. “Hey!” he says fast, reaching out and pulling her towards him. “Where you off to so quick? Talk to me a minute.” From behind he puts his arms tight around her, hugging her so that she can feel it pushing against her. He grinds his hips a little.

“You're drunk,” Sylvina says, trying to wiggle away from him. “You must be drunk out of your mind to be trying this with your best friend's girl.”

“Aw, he won't mind, Sylvina,” Drew says. “Me and him
share lots of things. He already told me how good you are with your mouth.”

“Let go of me,” Sylvina says as he pushes harder against her, biting at her neck.

“You smell good,” Drew moans, grabbing her breasts and squeezing hard. Sylvina twists her body and slaps her hand sharply, palm down, on Drew's crotch. He cries out like a kicked dog and sinks to his knees. Sylvina is shocked that the simple trick she saw once in a movie is so effective. She's smiling as she sits back down. The fat woman who finds Sylvina pretty is in the middle of a joke about a man who's the world's lousiest lover. Sylvina laughs at that one, and the woman seems especially pleased at the response.

“She's a good egg, that Sylvina,” the woman says to the pilot. “I used to think all Indian women were the same!”

“We are,” Sylvina says, feeling bold now. “We're all a bunch of drunken wagon-burners!” The crowd is taken off guard. A few of the men laugh. The women smile with tight lips and look elsewhere. “You know it's true!” Sylvina says. She doesn't know where to take this thing she has created. Use it like a punch in their faces or make it look like she is Queen of the Cree and friend of the white. She just lets her mouth go. “You know what Jesus said to us Crees?” Sylvina looks around at the faces. “Don't do anything till I get back.” Some more of them look at Sylvina now and laugh. “You know the one about the Cree girl who's getting raped by the fat guy?” Everyone is looking at her. “Stop it, mister! Stop it! You're crushing my smokes!” The whole table laughs now. Sylvina feels herself slip into their corner, into their pockets. She's not dangerous. She's a good joker.

“You're a funny one,” one of the men says. “Not a peep out of you all night, and it turns out you're a regular Jerry Lewis!”

Drew appears suddenly, red-faced and sad. “Where have you been?” the pilot shouts out. “Looks like you got caught in your zipper or something!” Everyone laughs. Sylvina laughs especially hard, aiming the force of her breath at Drew. He can't look at her.

Even though Sylvina's had so much to drink, her dreams that first night are vivid and startling, ones she remembers long after she wakes up in the early morning. She dreams of her husband sitting in a snowbank, his eyes bloodshot with rage. Dark figures behind him, arms raised. The snowbank is cocaine now, and her husband lies in it, face down. Sylvina lifts off the ground and away from him, and she is flying in the pilot's plane, over the reserve, all by herself. At first it's exhilarating to hold the steering, to work the throttle, but slowly the skies turn darker and the plane makes funny, menacing noises. Soon the plane is doing the opposite of what she wants it to do. She tries to steer it down towards the earth but it climbs higher. She tries to speed up but it slows down until it floats high in the air. Sylvina's stomach rises into her throat as the plane begins to fall slowly, then quickly towards the reserve. She wants to scream but, just as the plane's nose hits the ground, she's startled awake by the thump of the drunk pilot's arm on her chest as he turns over in sleep.

Sylvina can't fall back asleep now, and she thinks back to her friends on Moose Factory. She has left friends who can see each other in the dark. Friends who can sniff one another out in a blizzard. They have good ears and noses, her friends. Her husband has the best senses of all, and uses them for all the wrong reasons. Finding the drugs. He has lots of connections, suppliers stretching all the way south to Winnipeg and
Toronto and even America. He has the senses to look for and find Sylvina, if he wants. She wonders if he will. When she thinks of her husband, she can't help but think of the drugs too. She misses all that shit about as much as she's missing him. The idea of them appeals to her once in a while. But the reality is uglier.

Two weeks later and the town is feeling as small as Moose Factory. This is not what I left everything behind for, she tells herself. The pilot is beginning to complain that their drinking is cutting into his savings. He's working at the shop, coming home later each night. He doesn't even bother trying to hide the smell of rye on his breath.

Sylvina would begin going out herself, but has no money. The pilot promised her the world when they first met, but she didn't realize then that it was going to be this particular one. On the long days he's at work, Sylvina wakes late, then moves from room to room through the house. She sits in each one and pictures her daughters there, each with her own room. She laughs when she realizes that the pilot doesn't come into her little day-time fantasy.

“Mom?” Sylvina says into the phone.

“Where are you?” her mother asks. “The girls want to know.”

“I'm ... I want to come home. Send me some money. I'll pay you back.”

“Not only doesn't Peneshish talk, but Theresa's quit too since she realized you're gone.”

Sylvina pauses for a while. “I want to come home.”

Sylvina's mother takes a week wiring her the money. It's punishment for acting so foolishly, Sylvina knows. She's taken
to sneaking small bills from the pilot's wallet or jacket pocket late at night. He has turned mean and quiet, as if the winter cold has slipped inside his bones and hurts him but he is too tough to speak of it.

“I think you should get a job,” he says one night as they lie in bed. Neither has touched the other for days now, since the time the pilot casually mentioned that it would be fun to have Drew join them in bed. Sylvina laughed out loud when he said that, imagining chubby, weird Drew in bed with the two of them. Her laugh hurt the pilot's feelings more than she could have guessed. He's barely said anything to her in days. Until now.

“I'd get a job, but things between us don't seem to be working out too good.” Sylvina pauses and takes a breath. “I decided to head back to Moose Factory.” She looks over to him.

“Oh,” he says. After a few minutes of silence he says, “When are you leaving?”

“In two days. On the train.”

The pilot doesn't say anything else. Sylvina wonders what it was that she ever saw in him. Tomorrow night she will go out and celebrate her leaving.

This bar is too loud. The shouting miners looking for drunk and easy ass, the band up front sloppily playing heavy metal, screaming waitresses. Everything in this town is loud. The pilot still wasn't home tonight when Sylvina left. She wouldn't be surprised if she saw him here. She lets a cowboy buy her drinks and touch her hair. “You got pretty Indian hair,” he says over and over as they toast each other with sweet concoctions poured into shot glasses. The lousy band plays a sped-up version of “American Woman.”
Sylvina looks away from the band, straight at Drew sitting at a table alone. He looks like he's lost here with no one around him. His eyes widen in surprise when he meets Sylvina's glance. He raises his hand slowly, not sure, it seems, if he should greet her. Sylvina turns away quick, but it's too late. She knows he's seen her but she can't make herself look back at him.

“You be my little squaw tonight,” the cowboy says, leaning to Sylvina's ear, “and I'll be your Genital Custer.” She doesn't laugh. The joke makes the sweet booze in her stomach burn. “Sorry,” he says when he sees the reaction. He buys her another shot. “Where you from, anyways?” he asks after a while.