The Evolution of Alice (12 page)

“I’m not supposed to allow that,” I heard Ernie say.

After that, I heard footsteps coming in my direction. That was a surprise to me. Couldn’t think of who would come to see me. Hell, nobody even knew I was there. I woulda thought that maybe Ernie called Alice to come by, like he’d had the same thought as me about needing some company, but Alice didn’t walk like that and she didn’t sound like that neither. As the footsteps approached my cell I looked for somewhere else I could hide, but of course there was nowhere I could go. Woulda looked like a real idiot slipping underneath the bed, seeing as how it stuck right out from the wall like one of those floating shelves. I ended up walking out from the corner and sitting down on the bed just as the footsteps stopped. I was looking away at first, maybe because I was too ashamed to look up, in case it was somebody I knew real well, but I figured I had to eventually, so I did.

Gunner. Of all the people, it was Gunner standing at the bars beside Ernie. I got all warm in the chest and I wasn’t sure if I was angry or I felt bad for the bastard. Might’ve been a bit of both, I guess. His jaw was all swollen up, and the left side of his face was pretty much blood red. When I saw that, I got why he was talking funny. Musta been hard to say anything with his face looking the way it did.

Ernie set down a chair and motioned for Gunner to sit, which he did.

“Hey-uh, Gideon,” Gunner said.

I looked at Ernie.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Gunner’s come by to talk to you,” Ernie said, all calm.

I didn’t get why he sounded like that. Me, I was pretty far from calm. My chest just kept getting hotter and hotter, and my right hand started to hurt again like it was trying to remind me about what I’d done. I kept trying to think of why Gunner would be coming to see me after I’d knocked him out, but I drew a blank.

“I don’t really think I want to talk to him, Ernie,” I said.

If he was there for anything, I thought he was probably going to bark at me for getting caught like I did, throw it in my face. I didn’t need nobody to do that to me. I was doing that fine on my own.

“I think you should hear him out,” Ernie said.

“Do I have a choice?” I said.

“Not really,” he said.

Gunner and I shared an awkward look.

“You gonna bark at me or something?” I said.

Gunner shook his head.

“Fine, I guess,” I said to Ernie.

Ernie looked us both over, as though he wasn’t really sure if he should be leaving us like he was, even though we were separated by the bars and all, but then he took a deep breath and walked away.

“I’ll give you two some privacy,” he said as he settled back at his desk.

I tried my best not to look at Gunner, but I couldn’t keep myself from stealing glances at him. It’s like when you see a car accident, a bad one, and you don’t want to stare but you do anyway. That’s a good way to put it, I guess, because Gunner’s face sure looked like a car wreck or something. His jaw was crooked and because of that his whole face looked bent this way and that. Whatever he’d come there to talk to me about must’ve been hard to say, too, because there was a whole lot of silence right then. I couldn’t stand that. I wanted him to say what he had to say and leave. In the end, I figured if I said something, he might say something back.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about hitting you and all. You were being a shit, and I got mad but I shouldn’t’ve hit you.”

Gunner leaned forward in his chair. He tried to rest his face against his hand, but I guess he forgot about his injury. He winced and sat up straight.

“I’m not mad at you, you know,” he said. “Not really.”

He didn’t say anything for a little while, and I didn’t say anything neither, because I wasn’t sure what I woulda said in the first place. I’d already said everything I wanted to say, me. Not much else I could do but apologize. So, while I waited for him to keep talking, I killed time counting the metal bars. I got up to 13 before his lips opened a crack, probably about as far as he could manage.

“Everybody does things they wish they wouldn’t have done,” he said. “I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I might’ve punched me, too, you know. If I was you,” he said, and he said that real quiet, like he didn’t want me to hear. But it felt good to hear it, and I figured that Ernie was right about letting Gunner talk to me.

“I’m glad you come to see me,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I been feeling pretty heavy about it this morning but I feel a bit lighter now.”

Gunner rubbed his hands against his knees. And he was doing it hard, too, because I could see his knuckles get white.

“We’ve both been feeling heavy about things I guess,” he said. “We both regret things.”

“What’ve you got to regret?” I said.

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he stood up like he was about to leave. I stood up too and put both my hands against the bars. It felt kinda weird to me right then, because at first I didn’t want him to be there, and now I didn’t want him to leave. Imagine that, me wanting Gunner around. It’d been years since I could say something like that. He started to turn away.

“Gunner,” I said.

He turned back to me, put his hands in his pockets, but wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry about Grace,” he said. He opened his mouth a crack, closed it, and then opened it again. “What I said about her. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

He gave me one last little head nod with that big ol’ head of his—kinda looked like a bobble head, him—and then turned around and left me standing there. Walked right out the door after I seen him nodding to Ernie. I didn’t know what that was all about until a few minutes later, when I was sitting on the bed again, and Ernie come up to me and unlocked the jail cell. He swung the door open and motioned for me to step outside. You woulda thought right then that I’d jump up and run out of there, but I didn’t even get up. I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening.

“What’re you doing?” I said.

“Gunner doesn’t want you to be in here. He asked if I’d let you out, forget everything that happened.”

Ernie stepped to the side to give me a clear pathway. I stood up, took a step or two forward but didn’t leave then neither.

“You sure you heard him right?” I said.

Ernie shook his head. “He’s talking funny because of his jaw, but there was no mistaking what he said.”

“Gunner said that he didn’t want me in here?” I said.

“What do you think, that I’m playing a prank on you? He was real clear about it, okay? Now, I could keep you in here if I wanted to, but honestly I don’t want to and neither does ol’ Randy at the store. Now stop looking all funny at me and get the hell out of there.”

I don’t think I’ll ever understand that one, but eventually I did step outta that jail cell. Ernie offered me a ride home, but since I was a free man at that point I told him I’d rather walk. It wasn’t a long way from the
RCMP
detachment to my house anyway. When I got outside, the air felt fresh to me, and I took a few deep breaths before starting on my way. I guess you could say I was smellin’ freedom. And right then it didn’t matter that I’d walked around there a thousand times, because it felt like everything was new. Even the way I was feelin’ was new. You know, for years I’d thought that Gunner was a big piece of shit and that’s that, especially after what he’d said to me about Grace, but I don’t think I felt like that any more. I mean, I didn’t like what he said, I never would, but then he’d gone and done that kindness to me. I’m still not sure why he went and did that, but maybe all I have to know is that he ain’t all that bad.

Anyway, I didn’t even end up going home. I landed up heading over to the grocery store. “The scene of the crime” is what they’d say in one of my crime shows. I wanted to get some candies for Kathy and Jayne, you know. Ended up getting them some of those jujubes, without the yellow and black ones, of course. I didn’t get anything for me, though. By that time my craving was all gone.

Jill stood with Amanda in the foyer of the reserve’s school as their children scuttled off to class. The school was only about three years old and looked just about as nice as any she’d seen in the city. Better even. Jill and her friend were both staring at the new addition to the foyer, a set of large wooden carvings that represented the seven sacred teachings. There was an eagle, a buffalo, a bear, a beaver, a turtle, and a wolf. Jill counted them, and then counted them over again. She scratched her head.

“They’re missing one,” she said.

Amanda counted the carvings carefully, pointing at each as she did.

“Hey, you’re right,” Amanda said.

“They have six, and there’re supposed to be seven,” Jill said.

“Yeah, I know. I can count,” Amanda said.

They looked at the carvings carefully, each of them trying to figure out which one was missing.

“Mistapew is missing,” Jill said.

“Oh, yeah,” Amanda said.

“That one’s going to look deadly when it’s finished,” Jill said.

At that moment, a girl about the age of six tugged at Jill’s pant leg. Neither woman had noticed the girl standing there.

“Did ya know that Mistapew’s a really good hider?” she said.

Jill nodded.

“They say that’s why nobody can ever find him,” the girl said.

Jill smiled, and so did Amanda. Then the girl pointed out the front door, where in the distance the forest was visible.

“You see those trees over there?” the girl said.

“Yes,” Jill said.

“They’re trees, all right,” Amanda said.

“It could be right there and ya’d never know it,” the girl said.

The girl walked away without another word and left the women staring into the forest.

A
S A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL
, Sara wasn’t typically quiet. Neither was her mother, for that matter. Yet there they were, sitting at the dinner table, picking at their dinner and not saying a word. Their chewing and the tick of the cuckoo clock that hung over the stove were the only real sounds. And every once in a while they would hear water slapping against the sandbags at the back side of the house—it was almost up to their back door at this point—but they’d become so accustomed to it that the gentle clap, clap, clap didn’t register. Sara wondered, as she picked at her food, if other houses in the area were just as quiet as theirs, if the people within them were all forced to listen to chewing and ticking and clapping. She couldn’t imagine it any other way. It had been a tough time for everybody.

Earlier in the year, her little cousin Grace had been killed, and Auntie Alice had been getting sadder and sadder. It was so bad that they never really saw her any more, and, when Auntie Alice was seen, she was out on her swing in the back yard, even during the coldest days of what had been an abnormally bitter and snowy winter. Due to all the snow, when spring came, the lake overflowed and the flood began. They’d been waiting the past two days for an evacuation order. Many people had already left for the city regardless, but others like Sara and her Mother decided to stay home until they absolutely had to go, because being home was way better than being in the city. Auntie Alice, well, she had either left the rez entirely or just wasn’t coming out of her trailer. Sara wasn’t sure.

And, as though Grace’s death and the flooding wasn’t enough, young women on the rez were committing suicide. By now there’d been five deaths, one after the other. Each time one girl died, it seemed to get easier for the next. It had become a trend, like wearing yoga pants or UGGs or cowboy shirts. Sara had started searching the Internet for “suicide by hanging” after her first friend had been found dangling from the soccer goal outside the school. One girl, Margaret, hadn’t been successful. (Sara learned, via Google, that 70 percent of people get it right—meaning, they die one way or another.) She was at the hospital in the city now, brain damaged. It seemed like all the girls were doing it, “stringing themselves up,” the teenagers called it. The fifth and most recent death, just yesterday, had hit the hardest. Angela, one of Sara’s best friends, had been found hanged by her belt from a coat rack in the motel at the side of the highway. Sara couldn’t help thinking about what Angela would’ve experienced. She would’ve got scared as she began to lose consciousness. She would’ve grabbed at her neck. Panicked. After learning about Angela, Sara had locked herself in her bedroom. That would’ve scared the shit out of her mother if she hadn’t been able to hear Sara crying nonstop. When Sara did come out, her mother saw that she’d smashed up her laptop. It was in pieces on the bedroom floor. Sara didn’t want to learn about suicide any more.

“You know,” Sara’s mother finally said, “the Elders say there’re bad spirits around here causing all these things to happen. They say they’re stuck in the air, moving from one place to another, infecting everything just like a cold.”

Sara rolled her eyes. “And the Christians think it’s the devil,” she said.

Her mother shrugged. “Well, it’s the devil or it’s bad spirits,

one thing or the other. Maybe it’s the same thing anyway.”

“Well, at least they’re agreeing on something,” Sara said.

Her mother ignored her and said, “What we need is a big cleansing, that’s what we need.”

“If only the rez was flooded with holy water,” Sara said.

“Don’t be a smartass,” her mother said.

Sara picked up her fork and shovelled a forkful of macaroni into her mouth.

“I know two of those girls were close with you, and it’s hard to lose friends,” her mother said.

Sara shook her head and stabbed at a single piece of macaroni. Then, under her breath, she said, “They weren’t that close.”

Sara wanted her mother to stop talking about it. She wanted the silence back. But her mother continued anyway, saying, “You have little girls like Grace dying before they even get a chance to live, and then your friends are choosing to die. I know it’s a waste, and I know it’s hard to understand.”