Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (19 page)

The boy could see several paths worn into the fallen vegetation, and decided to follow the widest. Along the way, he saw broken branches hanging off trees in every direction. They were all snapped
in the same manner, either to the right, or to the left, in a small spot near the base. No long pressure fractures as if an axe had done it.

“Uncle Wayne? Are you here?” he’d called out, but surrounded by this many trees, he wouldn’t be heard by anyone who wasn’t within spitting distance. He trudged forward, hoping to find his uncle’s camp. Small island or not, he didn’t want to be wandering around its interior for too long. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to.

“I know you. Virgil, right?” came a voice from directly above.

His heart pounding, Virgil looked in the direction of the voice. There, amid the cedar branches, sat his mother’s brother, Wayne Benojee.

“Yeah, Virgil… Maggie’s son.”

Wayne regarded the boy for a second before dropping down to the ground without even a grunt.

For somebody who led such a weird life, Wayne looked remarkably average. He was thirty-two years old, and had long black hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a grey T-shirt and a worn jean jacket, worn jean pants and worn sneakers—in fact everything he was wearing seemed worn. But he was muscular in a wiry kind of way. His body said there was more to being dangerous than sheer physical strength. To his nephew, Wayne’s hands looked oddly callused. So this was his uncle Wayne. Virgil swallowed hard. This was what he had wanted, after all—to talk to his uncle. But the man was looking at him like he was an intruder.

“Well, what are you doing here?” Wayne sounded like somebody who rarely spoke in English. In the family, it was well known that Wayne had been the favourite. Unlike with the rest of her children, Lillian had spent long hours teaching the boy the intricacies of the Anishnawbe, so that now he spoke it better than most
seventy-year-olds. Even his years in local schools had not cracked his command of the language. But here he was speaking in English, knowing Virgil was of the generation whose knowledge of Anishnawbe was weak or non-existent.

Virgil tried to talk but his vocal cords let him down, and he managed little more than a gurgle. Trying to gain control, he swallowed hard. Wayne studied the boy as Virgil sought desperately to say something coherent. Again it was Wayne’s voice that ended the silence.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! You’re scared of me, aren’t you! I don’t… people… they don’t…” Wayne seemed frustrated, and swung his head angrily, his ponytail doing a three-sixty. “Why is it that everybody’s afraid of me? I just don’t get it. I’m a nice guy. I know a couple of jokes. But for some reason, everybody seems afraid of me—even my own family. It’s ’cause I live here alone, isn’t it? Can’t a guy get some privacy without being branded a weirdo? Geez! It’s high school all over again.” Still frustrated, Wayne kicked a tree. “Your mother’s the only one who gives me the time of day, barely. What, do I have tentacles? Am I rabid? Do I smell? What? Huh? What?”

A tantrum was not what Virgil had expected from his uncle. But that’s what he was observing. “Uncle Wayne?”

“Finally! He talks to me. What?”

“I need your help. It’s about Mom.”

“Maggie?” Wayne’s face had become stoic. “Okay. You got my attention. What’s up with Maggie?”

Virgil took a deep breath and stepped closer to his uncle. Time to pitch his case. “Well, you see, there’s this guy…”

Sometime later, back at Wayne’s camp, they were sharing a cup of tea brewed over an open fire as Virgil finished telling the tale of the mysterious motorcyclist, and his blushing mother.

“… and she was telling me this morning, they’re going out again tonight. A picnic, I think. I think she likes him. There’s something weird about him, Uncle Wayne. Really weird.” He almost said “weirder than you” but stopped himself. Instead, Virgil added more evaporated milk to his tea. Relieved that he could share his concerns with someone, the boy waited, sipping his sweetened tea.

A puzzled look darkened his uncle’s face. “So what do you want me to do about it? Your mother’s a grown woman. She’s older than me. And you actually think she’d listen to me? She’d listen to you more than she’d listen to me. You know she used to beat me up when we were young? All the time… the little… Want more tea?”

“Please. She did?” Virgil shook the question out of his head. He’d get to that later, once the more immediate crisis was dealt with. “But, Uncle Wayne, there’s something really not right about him. He can do strange things. Like animal calls. He sounds like the animals. I mean
really
sounds like the animals. Trains too…”

Wayne raised his face to the sky and let loose a spot-on imitation of a loon call. “Like that?” Somewhere off in the distance, a loon responded, eager for companionship.

“Better.”

For the second time, Wayne’s stoic demeanour seemed rattled. “Better? Better than that?”

Virgil nodded vigorously. “Way better. And he can do a bunch of others too that sound more real than the animals that do them.

I’ve heard him. It’s scary. That’s the kind of weird I mean. It’s not normal. He’s not normal.”

“Better than me?” Wayne muttered, swirling his tea. “Anyway, what do you want me to do about it? I’m just out here living my life. Doing my thing. Am I my sister’s keeper?”

“Please, Uncle Wayne…”

Tossing the last drops of his tea to the cedar-covered ground, Wayne dismissed Virgil’s worries with a shrug that looked oddly familiar. “Stop with the ‘please, Uncle Wayne.’ You’re the son of a single mother. You’d consider any guy showing any interest in your mother a threat. Basic psychology, I think. In my opinion, you’re worrying over nothing. Now go home and play baseball or something.”

“Oh, give me some credit. I thought of that too. I
am
thirteen, you know. But you don’t know everything, Uncle Wayne.
He kissed Grandma
. And it was a
real
kiss, I mean, tongue and
everything
. The kind you see in movies. I don’t think it was normal. Now he’s hanging around Mom all the time.”

This got Wayne’s attention. “My mother? He kissed my mother… that way? Why? And when? When did he do that? Huh? And why?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Wayne, but if you cared about my mother, your sister, it would be worth just an hour of your time, wouldn’t it?”

Wayne contemplated his tea for a few seconds. Virgil was conscious of time passing and hoped he could sway his uncle quickly. It would be getting dark soon.

“Still, I don’t understand why you came to get me. You’ve got Tim and Willie right there, and all the rest. You paddle all the way over here to find me. Not that I’m not glad for the visit, sometimes
I get kinda lonely and can use the company, but I barely know you. You barely know me. I still don’t get it.” With that, Wayne poured himself another cup of tea.

Virgil took a deep breath and decided to play his trump card. “You know things.”

“What do I know?”

“Stuff.”

“Everybody knows stuff. You know stuff. Your mother knows stuff. Most of it’s boring but it’s still classified as stuff.”

“Uncle Wayne, he dances.”

On a small island in the middle of a central Ontario lake, Wayne Benojee rolled his eyes, annoyed at the logic, or lack of it, presented by his thirteen-year-old nephew. “Virgil, everybody dances, most just not very well. I say this with the utmost respect to you, but so?”

“He dances at night. By himself. On the dock down by Beer Bay. Under the moon. And it’s like no other dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s not right. It… he’s different.”

This prompted a raised eyebrow from Wayne. “Not human? See, this is one of the reasons why I left the mainland. Too much of this television stuff screwing up minds. I don’t think you would even know what’s weird. And incidentally, weird can be good too.”

Now Virgil was angry. “You’re one to talk! You and… and whatever it is you’re doing over here.
That’s
weird. Everybody knows that. Do you know what they say about you?”

“That I’m Weird Wayne. Yeah, I know. Tell me something new.”

“What the hell are you doing out here anyways? Sacrificing goats or something?”

“Who said I was sacrificing goats? I’ve never even seen a goat in real life. Why would somebody say that? That’s so unfair. People can be cruel.” Wayne sat down on a cut-in-half cedar bench, clearly hurt, tea dripping from his tilted cup.

Seeing his uncle’s wounded response, Virgil realized he’d said a little too much. “Nobody. I’m sorry. Really. But people do wonder what you’re doing out here. All by yourself. Are you a monk or something?”

Wayne watched the last third of the tea pour out of his cup onto the ground. “I am a martial artist. That’s all.”

“Like karate or kung fu?” asked the boy.

“Something like that. It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.” Another call of the loon could be heard coming off the lake. This one sounding a little more frustrated. “Anyway, you were saying about this John Tanner…”

“Richardson. Or so he says. That’s another thing, out of nowhere he has two last names. And then there’s his eyes…”

“I’m confused. How did we get from him dancing to his eyes?”

“It’s all part of the whole thing, I guess. I think they changed colour. I’m almost sure of that. But I
am
sure about the dancing. The way he was dancing that night, it reminded me of a story Grandma once told me. It took me forever to remember it. Come on, Uncle Wayne, you gotta know it. About how Nanabush thought he was the best dancer in the world? And the grass disagreed. Ever heard it?”

Wayne nodded. “Oh yeah. I know that story. It was one of her favourites. Yeah, the grass issued a challenge, and Nanabush, being the arrogant kind of guy he was, accepted.” Remembering the cadence of his mother’s storytelling voice, he mimicked it as
the memory came to him. “So, one hot summer day, Nanbush and the grass decided to settle the issue. At dawn, they began, and they danced, and danced, and danced some more…”

Virgil picked up the story. “They danced all day and night, and the next day, forever it seemed, until they both fell down on the ground, exhausted. Because neither won. It was a stalemate. It was a contest neither could ever win. It’s been so long since I heard that one, it used to be one of my favourite stories, but she told it so much better.”

“I know,” acknowledged Wayne. “It was almost like she knew Nanabush. She had so many Nanabush stories.”

“Yeah, the way she told them, you could see everything that happened to him. And that’s exactly how I saw him dance, on that dock. I could hear Grandma’s voice in my head telling that story.”

Wayne and Virgil were both silent as they remembered their mother and grandmother respectively. Once more Wayne regretted not going to his mother’s funeral. But that was in the past.

Now he had a nephew on his hands, with unusual expectations of him, and an even more crazy reason for expecting them.

“So he can dance pretty good. I think the bizarre thing about that is you don’t find that in a White boy very often,” Wayne postulated.

“It’s not that, it’s
how
he dances. I’m telling you it has something to do with the moon. Clouds would come across the moon and he would stop dancing. I need you to see it for yourself. And… and… not only that!”

“Oh god, there’s more?”

“Oh yes. Then there’s the petroglyphs.”

“The what?”

“He carves pictures into rocks. But that’s not the weird part. On my favourite rock…”

“You have a favourite… rock? That’s so sad.”

“Listen please, Uncle Wayne. He carved this image of what I think is a woman and a man, on a motorcycle. Together. That’s gotta be him and Mom. I think he plans to ride off with her. Away. I really do.”

“Virgil…”

“And I think they’re going to be heading west, for some reason.”

Wayne’s face froze as he gazed at his nephew. “What makes you say west?”

“To the left of the motorcycle, there was a setting sun.”

“How do you know it was setting?”

“First of all, as I said, the petroglyph on the rock was on the west side. And secondly, who picks up women and goes for motorcycle rides at dawn?”

“Good point,” said Wayne. “You said he visited my mother too, before she passed away. How long before?”

“That day. That afternoon, in fact. She, um, died that night.”

Now Wayne’s mind seemed somewhere off in the distance.

“Is something wrong, Uncle Wayne? Are you going to help?”

Wayne kept looking to his left, toward the west, as his eyes betrayed puzzled thoughts. Virgil didn’t have to be a genius to figure out he’d hit some kind of nerve with the comment about heading west, though what exactly he couldn’t say.

Virgil decided to just charge forward, hoping his uncle would be swept along with his enthusiasm. “Look, Uncle Wayne, I know how this sounds. I’ve been wrestling with how to tell
you all night and all the way over here. I need help in figuring this out. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t… I don’t know… necessary. Please!”

Wayne silently weighed all the information the boy had given him, and how this little adventure to the mainland might interrupt his training. But there was another matter to take into consideration. He had not yet made a visit to his mother’s grave. He’d been putting it off because he was a private mourner, not a public one. Wayne knew his family was mad at him for not coming to the funeral, and whether they were right or wrong was irrelevant. This was still something he should do. He knew that much. And, he surmised, this was as good a time as any.