Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (21 page)

Maggie was finding it hard to focus. Regardless of the scars, this man had way too many muscles, and in all the right places. If anything, the scars added to his appeal. “Me? Um, I think it should just be left there in its natural state. It’s beautiful back there. Like creation intended. Be a shame to tear it up. I guess eventually, down the road, we’ll need the land for housing or something. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. That’s… that’s what I think. Yeah, that’s what I think all right. What… what do you think?” She winced at her own awkwardness.

“Leave it in its natural state, huh? Sounds good to me. Au naturel, you could say. There, done.” And with that he began drying himself with a worn, peach towel. “Oh, that feels so much better. I probably smell a lot better too. Anyway, I think you should go with your instincts. Down the road a good home usually beats a casino or a theme park.”

Casino? Theme park? How did John know about those? Submissions to the chief and council weren’t discussed outside of the council meetings. It was possible that somebody in the community had told him, but most kept their thoughts to themselves, for fear of somebody stealing the idea or taking the credit.

“John, how did you hear about the casino and theme park?”

John turned around and smiled at her. He always seemed to be smiling, like it was his most dangerous weapon. Granted, it was a beautiful, glowing smile, but he seemed to use it a little too frequently, like it was a get-out-of-jail-free card. Though Maggie supposed there were worst things a man could do than smile a lot.

“Those ideas aren’t open to the general public,” Maggie emphasized.

“I am not the general public.”

“Don’t try to smile your way out of this, John. That stuff is supposed to be confidential. So where—”

“Relax. It’s surprising what you can learn at Betty Lou’s Take-Out. You can pick up more than food poisoning there. You’re a politician, Maggie. You more than anybody else should know people like to talk. Especially when they think they have the best idea in the world. I don’t spend all my time chopping wood or riding my bike.”

Or working out
, Maggie added to herself. Then the kitchen door opened with a crash and the infamous Sammy Aandeg entered. He stood there, a man over seventy with a shock of white hair and a wrinkled face that included two suspicious eyes, holding in his left hand a worn plastic bag. Maggie thought he was skinnier than she remembered and oddly smaller. The old man caught sight of Maggie and scowled, his whole face melting into a frown.

John looked genuinely happy to see him. “Hey, Sammy, what’ve you got there?”

The man answered gruffly with one word in Anishnawbe.

John responded in English. “Sure they’re not toadstools? Might kill you.”

Sammy scowled again and swore at John, again in Anishnawbe. He waddled through the kitchen, heading to the living room, his thumb and two fingers on his free hand constantly rubbing against each other. As he shuffled by, he glanced at Maggie and started speaking at length. But not to her. To himself. The words poured out of him.

Laughing, John got out of the man’s way. “Okay, okay, just asking. You don’t have to get mean.”

Sammy continued talking to himself as he left the room. Maggie’s command of the language was good, not great, so she under stood enough to know he was talking about her. His Anishnawbe was excellent, but his syntax and phrasing sounded strange, even to her.

“I told you he was funny. Didn’t I say he was better than TV? I’ll be back in just a second.” John walked out of the room, leaving her alone in the kitchen.

She could still hear Sammy muttering to himself, his Anishnawbe practically indecipherable unless she paid seriously close attention.

Over the next minute or so, Maggie quickly put together enough Anishnawbe words to properly introduce herself from the doorway to the living room. “Hi, Sammy Aandeg. I don’t know if you know me, but my mother and father were…” She didn’t get very far because the man sitting on the couch threw a mushroom at her. It bounced off her shoulder and landed on the
table, where it rolled around. “… Lillian and Leonard Benojee…” she managed to finish, unsure if she should continue.

At the mention of Lillian’s name, Sammy looked up at her. She could almost see him struggling to surface through decades of alcohol, like her mother’s name was some sort of lifesaver he was grasping to reach. Evidently he managed to grab it with a couple of fingers, because he got up from the couch, still talking in his peculiar Anishnawbe, and wandered by Maggie into the kitchen. He nodded once at her. Not moving, Maggie watched as he shuffled around, apparently making something to eat. After a few minutes, he presented Maggie with a piece of toast with some jam on it. The way he held it out, it seemed to Maggie to be more than just toast and jam, like the gluten, sugar and strawberries all contained precious memories. She took it, and he gave her a weak smile before the more familiar Sammy came rushing back.

Mumbling once more to himself, he ignored Maggie as he passed her and left the room, his three fingers never stopping their friction.

Again there was something oddly familiar about what Sammy was saying. He had stopped talking about her and had started reciting something. She cursed herself for not being more fluent in her mother’s language. The mystery began to annoy her, so she put down the toast and ran over some of the words she had recognized, then translated them back to English to establish a pattern.

John re-entered the room and interrupted her thought process. He was dressed for their evening together. He wore his black pants, denim instead of leather, but he still had his boots on. And his shirt was a lovely shade of green to bring out those magnificent hazel eyes.

“Wow,” she said. “You clean up nice.”

“Thank you, madam,” he said, giving an exaggerated bow. “Clean underwear too. Ironed shirt. They do make a difference. I do believe I am presentable to the public now. You sure are lucky I made our dinner already. I was not expecting you to show up here.”

The shirt looked like it had been cut to accent his build. Maggie immediately regretted not having put on something a little more… attractive. He almost looked prettier than she did, and that was never a good thing.

“Where are we going on this little picnic?”

From out of the refrigerator, John removed a medium-sized cardboard box. “Our dinner. Judge it by the contents, not the cardboard. I thought we’d go to a place that’s near where you live. Down by Beer Bay, I think it’s called. There’s a lovely spot by the dock. What do you say?”

Maggie stood up. “I’m game. What about Sammy?”

“Sammy? He’ll be okay. He’s looked after himself here for almost sixty years.”

“John, did you understand what he was saying? I mean, his Anishnawbe?”

While they talked, John was in the kitchen, grabbing cutlery, salt, pepper, napkins and such. “Yeah. He’s been helping me bone up on it. I’m actually getting quite good now. Pretty soon you’ll think I’ve been speaking it all my life. Where did I put the matches? Can’t have an evening picnic without a campfire. Oh, here they are. Ready?”

Somewhere upstairs Sammy was talking to himself. “John, have you ever noticed that the way he talks is kind of strange? I mean, he obviously speaks it very well but he speaks it really differently too. Do you know why?”

John opened the door and waited for Maggie to join him outside. “Of course. Took me a while to figure it out but the answer finally occurred to me. Well, are you coming? Or did you suddenly have an attack of good judgment?”

They both exited the house and Maggie instinctively walked toward her car as John walked toward his bike. They were both at their vehicles before they noticed they were standing separately.

“Um, Maggie, it might be more fun if we took my bike. Something tells me a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle has got to be more kicks than a 2002 Chrysler. What do you say?”

A chance to ride on that fabulous machine once more? To snuggle against tall, White and handsome again? Sure, she convinced herself, why the hell not? Maggie locked her car doors. She didn’t normally do that out here but Sammy had unnerved her.

“What was that you were saying about something occurring to you, regarding Sammy?”

John pushed his bike out from the protection of the shed. “Oh, that. He speaks in iambic pentameter.”

Maggie stopped halfway to John’s bike, trying to understand. “Iambic what?”

“Pentameter. You know, like Shakespeare.”

It sounded so… everyday, the way John put it. “‘To be or not to be… ’—that kind of thing?”

“Yep, only in Anishnawbe. Same structure, weak, strong, weak, strong. Ten syllables. All the usual rules. Took me a while to figure it out. I’m not exactly a Shakespearean scholar, you know. You look surprised. There are more things in heaven and earth, Maggie. Here—” John held out her crash helmet, which was now painted similarly to his. His still had the raven on the side, but hers bore a different image.

“Is that a beaver?” she asked.

“Yep. Good eye. Hard working. Industrious. Beautiful. Loving to its children. Nice tail. When I thought of you, I instantly thought of a beaver.”

Maggie wasn’t exactly sure how to take that, or the innocent smile that came with the explanation.

“I… I… okay.” She held the helmet in her hands, looking it over. It was indeed a good representation of a beaver, allowing for some artistic licence. But for some reason, she felt vaguely insulted. “Um, you were saying about Sammy…”

“Right,” he said as he swung his leg over the motorcycle. “From what I can make out by what he says between soliloquies, he went to residential school.”

“Yeah, I know that much. My mother was there with him, as well as a few others. Told me some pretty horrible things happened to him. She was so lucky she was there only two years.”

“I find you make your own luck. But back to Sammy. Unfortunately there was some bastard there named Father McKenzie, directly from England, who thought the sun rose and set on Her Majesty’s mighty empire. To him, there was the Bible and Shakespeare. Everything else was bargain-basement literature, not really worth studying. So, he was here to civilize the Native people.”

Maggie took her position on the bike in front of John, carefully placing the picnic basket on her lap. Part of her was disappointed there would be no in-transit cuddling as the picnic basket required dual hand restraint. She was also engrossed in what John was telling her.

“Evidently when he was younger, Sammy was a bit of a rebel. As you probably know, they forbade the students from speaking
their language, but God bless him, he refused to give it up. Even as a kid he was scrappy. They beat him practically every day. I think to the point it made him kinda crazy. That can happen after a decade of abuse. He spoke English, but every once in a while when they thought they’d won, he’d let loose some Anishnawbe just to piss them off.”

“What does that have to do with Shakespeare?”

“That’s the real clever part. The teacher who so loved the Bard would get incensed that this young Indian boy would dare to corrupt what he considered the most beautiful words ever written, by speaking them in a filthy bastard language. He considered that a personal insult. So the man took it upon himself to dish out all Sammy’s corporal punishment. Somewhere in Sammy’s mind, he’s made the decision to speak just Anishnawbe. I don’t think he has spoken a word of English since. And he only speaks Anishnawbe in iambic pentameter. It was sort of his revenge on the guy. Can you imagine the kind of self-discipline and intelligence that it would take to do that day after day? His mind is kind of stuck on it now. Sort of in a mental loop. Everybody just thinks he’s crazy old Sammy Aandeg, but there’s method to his madness. You should hear his Lear monologue. Quite moving and amazing. Stratford could make a fortune off him.”

“That’s… original. I never knew any of that. How amazing.” John nodded. “I’ll say. And if you read between the lines, I also think the guy was abusing him, in more ways than one. You don’t get to be like Sammy, screaming in the night the way he does, unless the Father was doing a little more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ than was proper. Oh well, I think Sammy’s got the last laugh. I bet to this day that guy’s cursing Sammy in… what’s that place called? Hell. What a great story, huh? Took me forever to get it out of him.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes it is, but hey, it’s kept him strong in his own way, and given him a purpose. How many people out there have either? Okay, put your helmet on, it’s dinner time!”

Maggie donned her helmet just in time, because John gunned the machine. It took off with a lurch.

Sitting at the very top of the telephone-totem pole, on the raven’s head, was a lone raccoon, watching the motorcycle as it receded into the distance. Its little fingers twitched occasionally.

All the way to Beer Bay, the Indian chief was nestled atop the gas tank of the Indian Chief, and very conscious of her proximity to the personable young man. Still, Maggie found her thoughts returning to her encounter with Sammy Aandeg, and what happened in his youth. As they made their way through the streets of Otter Lake, her hands protectively held the box across the gas tank. Absentmindedly, she wondered what a man like John had made them to eat. She would know soon enough.

Less than fifteen minutes later, they arrived at a secluded part of the bay. Turning off the ignition, John waited for her to get off before getting off himself and removing his helmet. “I love this place,” he said.

“You do? Why?”

“It brings back so many memories. Maybe I’ll tell you some of them someday. Hey, let’s go out to the dock to eat. It’s perfect there.” Grabbing the box and tucking it under his arm, he extended his hand for Maggie to take.

Together, they walked toward the water. The sun was still fairly high above the horizon, casting light on this lazy spring evening. John pulled a blanket from his saddlebags and spread it on the planks. “Dinner has begun.”

Slowly he unpacked all the goodies he had prepared. From the box he pulled out a bottle of Chilean Syrah.