Keeper'n Me (3 page)

“Jane, jeez,” was all I said.

She says those were the last words she heard, and the last sight she had of me for twenty years was from the back window of that schoolbus. A little Ojibway boy all hunched over in the sandbox with a little red truck with one wheel missing, growin' smaller'n smaller, till it looked like the land just swallowed me up. When she got home that night the sandbox was empty except for that little blue and red truck, the wind already busy burying it in the sand. When we met again twenty years later she grabbed me in that same big, warm hug and just held on for a long, long time.

By the time I made it back here I was lost. At twenty-five years old I never figured on bein' no Indian. I didn't remember a thing about my earlier life and when I disappeared alone into the foster homes I disappeared completely from the Indian world. Everywhere they moved me I was the only Indian and no one ever took the time to tell me who I was, where I came from or even what the hell was going on. I mean, being from a nomadic culture is one thing but keeping a kid on the
move for twelve years is ridiculous. I was in and out of more homes than your average cat burglar.

Anyway, I lost touch with who I was pretty quick. Growing up in all-white homes, going to all-white schools, playing with all-white kids can get a guy to thinking and reacting all-white himself after a while. With no one pitching in any information I just figured I was a brown white guy.

Because around about the early sixties there was only a couple of ways for anybody to get to know about Indians, unless you knew a few of course, which I didn't. It was the same for white people as for those of us trying to be white. The most popular way of learning about Indians was television. Man, I remember Saturday mornings watching them Westerns and cheering like crazy for the cowboys like everyone else and getting all squirmy inside when the savages were threatening and feelin' the dread we were all supposed to feel when their drums would sound late at night. Injuns. Scary devils. Heathens. All of a sudden popping up at the top of a hill, taking scalps, stealin' horses, talking stupid English and always, always riding right into the guns of the pioneers. We tumbled off horses better'n anybody and that was about all the good you could say. It was embarrassing stuff to be watching.

Then there was books. Indians never got mentioned in any of the schoolbooks except for being the guides for the brave explorers busy discovering the country. I could never ever figure out how you could say you were
out discovering something when you needed a guide to help you find it. But Indians were always second to the explorers who were creating the real history of North America. Comic books and novels were just carbon copies of the textbook and TV and movie Indians. We were either heathen devils running around killing people or just simple savages who desperately needed the help of the missionaries in order to get straightened out and live like real people. There weren't any other kind of stories.

Of course, everyone was buying into these messages and I started hearing the usual stuff. Indians were lazy, no account, drunken bums, living on welfare, mooching change on street corners and really needing some direction. If white people hadn't got here when they did we'd have all died.

I remember one time after doing something against the rules in one home I was in, the man of the house drove me into the Indian section of town. He drove real slow, pointing out drunks and dirty-looking people reeling around on the sidewalks or sleeping crumpled up in alleys.

Then he said, “See. Those are Indians. Look at them. If you don't start shaping up and doing what you're told around here, that's what you're going to become!”

And the kids I played with were kinda the same—kids bein' kids and all. They were always on me with the usual “ugh, how, Tonto” stuff they learned from TV, their parents or both. Always asking me stuff like what's your
tribe, how do you say such-and-such in Indian, what does dog taste like, you know, run-of-the-mill kid stuff.

One time we're busy getting up a neighborhood game of cowboys and Indians. Except back then it was “cowboys and itchybums”—kids bein' kids and all. Naturally being the only itchybum in the crowd my role was easily cast. No one could understand why I broke into tears that day. No one could understand why I dropped my little guns and holster and ran indoors and up to my room, and I, in turn, couldn't understand why everyone at the suppertable that night broke into uncontrollable laughter when I was asked about it and I explained, “ 'Cause I don't know how to be an Indian!”

And that's how it was for me growing up. I was embarrassed about being an Indian and I was afraid that if I ever met a real one I wouldn't know what to do or say. So I started trying to fit into that white world as best I could. I decided that I would try to learn to be anything other than what I was. I didn't want to be compared to any of the images I had of my own people, of myself. But this brown skin of mine was always a pretty good clue to most people that there must have been a redskin or two creeping around my mama's woodpile.

So at various times I was Hawaiian, Polynesian, Mexican or Chinese. Anything but Indian. Those people on the street that day still haunted me. Of course, if I got cornered on evidence then I'd become any one of four famous kinds of Indian. I was either Apache, Sioux, Cherokee or Commanche. Everyone had heard
of those Indians. I mean, if you absolutely had to be an Indian, at least be one that everyone had heard of. Embarrassed as I was at the time I sure didn't want to be no Passamaquoddy, Flathead, Dogrib or Ojibway. Aiming for the romantic was my game plan.

I fell in love with the blues when I was twenty. Something in the music sorta bumped up against something deep inside me and made it move. Maybe it was the built-in lonely that got me, or the moving, searching, losing and fightin' for a living that good blues singers gotta do before they can really put it out there. I don't know for sure what it was, but the first time I heard it I was hooked. Still love the sound of the blues late at night. Kinda fits in with the sounds of the north. All that moanin' and cryin' goes real good with a dark, dark night, the wind howling through the trees and a fire going real good in the cabin. There's even a few White Dog folks starting to like it too now. Mostly folks up here like the old-time fiddle tunes like “The Red River Jig” and “Maple Sugar” or the pow-wow songs they tape during pow-wow season, but some have taken a liking to dropping by late at night and sitting on the porch listening to the blues on our battery tape player. Guess maybe us Indians have a lot in common with our black brothers and sisters when it comes to bein' blue about things.

Wally Red Sky pooh-poohs it all though. Wally's bound and determined to be known as the best Indian
country-and-western singer ever. Spent too much time listening to his daddy's old country records and now he walks around with his hair all Brylcreemed up and swept back, wearing tasseled western shirts and smellin' of Old Spice. Says Indians are more tuned in to the country on accounta they're closer to the land and that things like wide-open spaces and riding horses are more Indian than gettin' drunk and crying over lost women. I tried to point out to him that most country songs are about those very same things, but he just grins and walks away shaking his shiny head all sad like.

“Catch on one o' these days, Garnet,” he says. “One o' these days you'll be singin' ‘I Saw the Light' 'steada ‘Goin' Down That Road Feelin' Bad.' ”

I spent a lotta time going down a lotta roads feelin' bad actually. When I heard the blues they just kinda fit right into my head and that was actually the first step in my getting back here. Funny how those insignificant little moments wind up being the biggest things in your life after you live some. Who'da ever thought that some black blues band in a tavern in downtown Toronto would be the first step on my road back to White Dog. Funny, but that's what happened.

See, I split the foster homes at sixteen and went wandering everywhere. I hitchhiked all over looking for something to do or just somewhere to be. Got around pretty good and saw a lotta country over the next four years but just couldn't find it in me to settle down anywhere. My friend Keeper calls it “havin' the old slidey
foot.” Well I had that old slidey foot thing going real good in my life until I hit T.O. in '77.

Back then I was running a lotta games past people. Reason I was moving around so much was because my games were pretty easy to see through actually and I'd always split just before I got called on my bull. I still didn't wanna be known as an Indian. Mostly on accounta the Indians I saw those years were pretty much the same kind my foster father'd shown me in the car that day. Scary-looking, dirty, drunk, fightin' in the street or passed out in the alley, and I sure didn't wanna be connected to them in any way. So I'd hit town and be anybody from anywhere when I'd meet up with folks.

I was a homeless Hawaiian for a while there in Niagara Falls. Had these flowered shirts I found at the Sally Ann, mirrored sunglasses on a rope around my neck, brushcut, and even got a beat up old ukulele at a pawnshop. We'd be drinkin' wine in the park and I'd be teaching people how to say things in fictitious Hawaiian and singing these dumb songs on that ukulele. Touching stuff like “KahmonIwannalayya,” “Nookienookienow” or “The Best Leis Are Hawaiian” for the ladies present. Still don't know how that dumb stuff passed, probably the wine more'n anything, but I was a Hawaiian refugee there for a while.

Another time after seeing a couple of episodes of “Kung Fu” on TV I became a half-Chinese guy looking for my father all across North America. He was supposed to be some Canadian businessman knocked up
my ma, little Wing Fey, while on a trip to the East. He left me'n Ma in desperate poverty in Shanghai. I was gonna use my considerable kung fu skills on him when I found him and avenge the death of Wing Fey, who'd succumbed to malaria finally after putting me through some monk temple in the mountains. That one ran pretty good in a few towns until I got too drunk in Sudbury and gave a traditional Chinese name to a big biker named Cow Pie. Guess he didn't like being referred to as Sum Dum Fuk. My kung fu skills failed me utterly.

Then there was the period I roamed around being Pancho Santilla, the Mexican/Apache boxer who'd quit fighting forever after kililin' some guy in a bar fight in Taos. Got the name Taos from watchin' “McCloud” on TV and figured it was a cool-soundin' name to be talking about. Taos. Kinda rolled right off your tongue and made whatever story you were running prettier and more believable, I thought. It was cool to be part Apache since there weren't any Apaches in Canada and I wasn't likely to run into any and Apaches were rated pretty highly on mainstream society's masculinity scale anyway. Anytime you had to be Indian, see, anytime the other shtick wasn't a go, well, you had to be one of the top-rated prime-time kinda Indians. Didn't dive into that one too often but the old Pancho Santilla routine was always worth a few draft somewhere.

Not being Indian was a full-time occupation and maybe me gravitating towards bein' a storyteller isn't
that difficult a thing to understand now. Some of those tales were pretty wild back then, but when they say that the truth is sometimes stranger'n fiction they musta had me'n my life in mind.

When I discovered the blues I was pretty much ready for anything. I'd just gotten back from working a few months on a railroad gang tamping up big stretches of track across southern Ontario. So I hit Toronto with a lotta money and figured a new set of clothes and a girlfriend would make life pretty sweet for a while. Managed to find a rooming house close to the downtown strip and I remember thinking that life wasn't such a bad deal after all. I'd been kind of a Toronto regular over the years, stopping in for a few months every now and then. One night after supper I changed into my new duds and headed out for a big night on the town, not really sure where I was headed except I wasn't going anywhere near the Warwick Hotel or the Silver Dollar where all the Indians hung out. But something big was in the air and I set out just knowing that this was one a those nights that would go down in history.

That was the night I met Lonnie Flowers.

Lonnie Flowers was a tall, rangy black guy who hung out downtown selling pot and shooting pool. I'd heard of him from some of the other streeters but until that night never had anything to do with him. Hanging out on the street, you hear a lotta names but mostly you hang with those you know and circles can be pretty
small there. Anyway, the way things turned out we'd both heard of each other but never crossed paths.

I was heading down Yonge thinking maybe I'd catch a few strippers at the Zanzibar and my mind was a few million miles away in the future when I heard this voice calling out to me.

“Say, my man, what it is? You lookin'?”

He was standing there in the doorway with this great big purple silk superfly hat on and an orange leisure suit with bell-bottoms and those platform shoes that were real big back then. Had a Fu Manchu mustache and an Afro sticking out from under the hat and he was smiling. Good-looking guy but giving off the air that tells you this isn't someone you mess with.

“Huh?” I said with all the cool of a downtown pro.

“What, you deaf foo'?” he said, leaning in a little closer. “You sorry ass need some mendin', my man. Bring your narrow tired-lookin' butt over here.”

“Huh?” I said again, wondering where in the heck this guy had come from.

“Shit. You real downtown, ain'tcha? Got me a regular Jethro Bodine here. Man, c'mere!”

There wasn't anything else to do, so I edged into the doorway beside him. I'm about six feet even but Lonnie Flowers was head and shoulders taller than me even without the platform shoes. Besides, I kinda liked the way he talked, all fast and moving around, hands and feet going in rhythm with his speech. We stood there a moment and then he offered me a smoke. I don't smoke
but I took one anyway and tucked it behind my ear like a lot of guys I knew. He watched me, smiling with his eyes and shaking his head.