The Journey Prize Stories 24 (14 page)

She can’t even afford me a piteous “I’m sorry” look. “Deal,” my mom says. “One hundred dollars for the card.”

“Okay: one hundred dollars.”

Now, anyone that’s spent any time being nine years old knows that you have to see the money before letting someone you’re doing a deal with put their meat hooks on what you’re selling. Because even if they do take off without paying you, you at least know that they’ve got the money to make it worth chasing them down and beating it out of them. Without seeing a nickel, my mom hands over the card. As soon as the pile has it clutched in his baby penises he brings the card up to his claw, as if to feed an animal he’s got in a headlock, and tears Rance Davis in half and lets the halves flutter stupidly onto the ground with the rest of the mess he’s made.

“Fuck you,” he says to my mom, pointing an erect baby penis at her.

“Fuck you,” he says to me, pegging me with the same baby boner.

“So fuck us both, then?” I ask.

The pile smiles at me, his mustache like an eyebrow over a hideous yellow eye. “That’s right.” We finally understand each other.

Giving his shoulder bag one final, absolute adjustment, the pile galumphs away.

All the other men in all their other fanny packs are staring at us. I’m looking at my mom, trying to decide whether or not I can hate her for the rest of my life because of this, if this one time is enough of a reason. Every last Sunday I come here with her, for her – not that I have anything better to do – and entertain this insane delusion of hers. All this for her, and she’s ready to sell me out in an instant. People have hated people for less.

I guess because someone has to say something, my mom turns to me and, instead of “I’m sorry,” she makes a gross face and says, “Did you get a load of that asshole’s little hand?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It was disgusting.”

Like we’d rehearsed it before, we both, at the exact same time, screw up our faces and distort our left hands and make this guttural noise – like, “Grarrrrrrrrrr” – and this is going to go on to be a shared thing that we do whenever something’s disgusting or unreasonable. We make the hand, do the noise, and know exactly where all that came from.

I
n the long ago, the rivers bore monsters. One dwelt beneath the foam where the Mahatta ran quick from O’Connell Lake, where the river flowed in faces, geometric and flat and reflecting sun like a prism. Every ripple wore a mirror, and for every mirror, the monster wore an eye. Its tongue lolled beneath rock and sand on the shore, and when villagers knelt on the bank to collect water, the muscle would flex, tremble the pebbles, and snatch the villagers into the monster’s jaw. When only a young girl and her grandmother remained, Hilatusala the Transformer visited to inquire what had happened. The grandmother spoke of their missing neighbours, of the monster with many eyes and its tongue beneath the sand. Hilatusala listened, then urged the girl to collect water, urged her to
not be afraid
. So she fetched her pail and kissed her grandmother’s cheek and strode the path to river’s edge. Before the girl could notice the shifting gravel, she was launched into the air with a speed that knocked her to her back. She opened her eyes to see real birds
and clouds and jagged trees instead of their rippling reflections. Then the monster snapped its teeth shut, and the fleshy plates that lined its throat shrugged and expanded and slid the girl deeper into black, which is when she heard Hilatusala’s song. The notes screamed all at once, like a raven’s shriek and surging water and the whine of a jade knife against cedar. The monster’s throat plates shrugged and the girl was hurtled over its tongue, between the teeth, and into sunlight. She landed in the river. Above her, the monster’s jowls shook, its lips parted, and the wet bones of the girl’s neighbours spewed onto the shore. Spines and sickle ribs and collarbones spilled from the corners of its mouth until the monster had vomited out all of the villagers and coiled back beneath the surface. And so the girl and her grandmother set to work. They matched anklebones to kneecaps, hips to ribs, spine to skull until they reassembled an entire skeleton. Then the Transformer sprinkled the bones with Life Water, and tendons bloomed between ligaments like elastic bands, then muscles and skin and smooth black hair, until a villager was reborn. The more friends they reconstructed, the more friends helped them reconstruct. And so it was that notch-to-groove, vertebrae-by-vertebrae, the girl rebuilt her village.

The canoe poked from the pine tree like a wooden wing, and they crouched ten feet beneath it on either side of a stump. Milton set the plates side by side and sprinkled them with fuel from a plastic lighter. “My grandmother lived up North,” he said. “They burned food for their ancestors. For the spirits.”

Natalie zipped the collar of her track jacket, withdrew her fists into its nylon sleeves as he dug for something in his pocket.

“I found this in the
Vancouver Sun
.” He pressed a folded newspaper clipping into her palm.

She opened it to find a photo of her mom and brother at a swim meet. Her brother wore goggles strapped to his forehead and her mom’s good blouse was wet from his arm around her shoulder. They used the same photo in all the papers.

He tossed her the matchbook. She struck two matches at the same time like she’d seen someone do in the movies then dropped them onto the plates.

“Normally you offer clothes,” he said, as the fire ballooned, then shrunk into smoke. “But I think it makes more sense to burn something that can help the food find the right spirits.”

He nodded to the clipping and Natalie dangled it above the embers, then let go, watching their faces glow as the paper floated and whirled into a half shell of sea urchin, which cupped a meek flame like palms around a tea candle.

“Do you still have her cedar spinning top?” he asked, and pointed his chin at the pine tree, at the canoe.

She tugged the top from the pocket of her cut-offs, the same ones she’d worn yesterday, and tossed it onto the fire. The salmon skin shrivelled and curled on the plates, spitting fat in hot pops. Milton drew the spool of thread from his pocket and nestled that in the embers, too.

“Make the fire bigger,” she said.

“Bigger?” His cheeks were long and flat, unaccented by bones, and his black eyebrows stretched low over his eyes.

“More lighter fluid.”

He fumbled with the metal valve and dumped a stream of butane into the embers, snapping the flames vertical. The smoke burned thick from the plates, swelled into Natalie’s
nostrils with the fishy tang of burning oolichan grease. She watched the flames twist around lumps of camas root, watched the shadows cast on Milton’s cheeks, how they flapped across the bridge of his nose like crow feathers.

“Let me tell you about the girl who rebuilt her village from bones,” he said.

All the guests were outside, the big house tables papered with greasy napkins and plates. Salmon skins clung from forget-me-not rims, hiding the fishbone tepees that had been quietly erected on the tablecloth. Natalie poured herself pink lemonade as Milton strolled to the food warmers and salad bowls at the far end.

“Normally they dance in here, too,” he said. “But outside holds more people.” He uncurled the salmon foil and lifted a flank with his fingers onto a fresh plate. “Come on.”

“I’m full.”

“It’s not for you.”

Lemon pulp stung her tongue; she swished her mouth with a swig of someone else’s cola and joined him at the table. She’d seen the halved porcupines at dinner, the orange meat that hung from their husks in tongues. She never tried one because she had no one to ask what it was.

“A sea egg,” said Milton.

She looked up and realized he was watching her. “A what?”

“An urchin.”

She took the half-sphere and set it on an empty plate. The salmon remained on the cedar plank it was cooked on. Gummy white fat oozed between flesh and silver in irregular spumes,
and it slicked the insides of her fingernails when she separated a hunk from the skin.

“Did your brother like camas root?”

“Camas root?”

Milton laid a wedge of what looked like sweet potato next to his salmon. “How about bannock?”

“I think we baked that on field trips.”

“Where?” He tore a corner from the bread in the cookie tin.

“Squamish.” She shovelled wild rice onto her plate with her hand. “A cultural centre.” She liked the feel of food in her palms, the grains of rice squashed beneath her nails with the salmon fat.

“Genuine Authentic Aboriginal Village?”

“Right,” she said. “Somewhere between ski lifts.”

“And how authentic were the Aboriginals?”

She fiddled with the tablecloth, fingered her initials in grease on the plastic. “They snowshoed.”

“Damn,” he said. “How to top that.”

“Ever tried? To snowshoe.”

“Once. With duct tape and my brother’s Ping-Pong paddles.”

She maintained eye contact as he grinned at her, made a point to not look away first. He plunged his thumb into a jar of yellow wax and stepped toward her, presenting it like a birthday candle, like she should blow it out. After a whiff she leaned away. “What is that?”

“Oolichan grease.” He jerked his hand as though to smear it on her wrist.

She shrunk toward the table and stabbed her own thumb in the jar. Then she faced him, bent her knees, and shadowed his hand, left and right.

He wiped his fingers on a napkin. “One-two-three-four, I declare a thumb war?”

“Bow, shake, corners, begin.”

He looked toward the front doorway and stepped from the table. “We should go. Soon they’ll come back to clean.”

She smeared her thumb in a brassy arc on her plate as he slid out the doorless back exit, then turned to jog after him. He was headed down the path she’d followed yesterday – toward the cove, the canoe in the pine, and her new friend who slept in its hull.

At the potlatch Natalie sat next to an Orchid of the Western Sky. The clans had gathered in a tree-webbed clearing of the woods, and the single flower sprouted behind her corner of the sitting log. The pouch bobbed under a white hood between two pea-yellow wings so that the orchid looked like a cheek-less milkmaid, all neck and tongue and cotton frill cap, blonde pigtails out the sides. It must have been planted – her uncle says Western Skies are hybrids.

Sage burned on all sides of the clearing – narrow bundles tied with twine and secured in the dirt with rocks. The smoke smelled stiffly sweet and reminded Natalie of the kids at her old school, who shared joints in the snowberry bushes behind the smoke pit.

A man in a sealskin vest stood outside the spectator ring. He hacked at a cedar log with his knife, and two young girls with chin-length hair distributed strips of bark to guests. Natalie tied hers around her head as she watched the others do. Her uncle stood on the other side of the fire, lilac golf shirt tucked
loosely into khaki shorts. He was chatting with the local band chief and a white woman she figured to be a town council member. His eyes shone pale blue in the torchlight and met her own. When he waved for her to join them, she looked down and pretended not to see.

Someone sat beside her, knocked his knees against hers, so she glanced up, saw it was Milton, and turned away.

“I said I was sorry,” he said.

She eyed the orchid, her faceless milkmaid, its roseate and waxy tongue.

“Christ, you people think
we
hold grudges.” He poked her hip. “Well, did you see Bakwas?”

“No.” No wild man of the words for her.

“You look disappointed.”

“I’d have eaten his cockles in a heartbeat.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’d be dead.”

The sound of shaking stones rattled from the corner of the clearing, followed by a shrill whistle and drumbeats. A man sat on the far edge of the ring. He wore a mask with a black beak as long as the girl’s tree canoe, harnessed to his chest for support. Its lips were painted rust red, its eyes skyward ovoids, and cedar bark hung in shreds over the man’s back. He cocked the mask left-right-left-right, and yanked a string that snapped the beak closed. Natalie jumped.

“That’s the Man-Eating Raven,” said Milton.

The raven capered to his feet, then squatted, then capered again toward the fire, black button blanket flapping at his ankles like heavy wings. Another dancer entered the circle. The beak on his mask was painted pitch and curled like a tidal wave.

“Crooked-Beak of Heaven,” said Milton. “Both serve the Cannibal at the North end of the world.”

The birds leapt at each other, snapped their beaks with wooden cracks that made Natalie flinch each time. The fire threw their oblong, man-eating shadows onto the faces of the spectators.

“Follow me.” Milton nodded to the big house and she felt his rough, moist fingers on her elbow.

The canoe in the trees must have been carved for a child because Natalie couldn’t lie lengthwise without her calves slung over the edge. She sat cross-legged instead. Next to the bones, which were folded loosely inside a wool blanket. The bundle was wound taut at the feet, but it had unravelled at the hips, maybe picked apart by gulls. A spiny branch of the pine tree poked between two ribs and from it hung a pinecone like a caged canary. Plates of a copper necklace fanned over the skeleton’s clavicle, the smallest one dangling in the gap above its breastbone.

The dead grey sides of the dugout were chiselled, grooved, and tree needles filled the bottom. The sky was dark now, and in the moonlight the Chinese beads glittered from the hull like discarded fish eyes. They dribbled from a small, capsized cedar basket and piled in the slanted side of the canoe with the toys – cedar bark tops, buck antler gambling sticks that she recognized from the museum, and whalebone dice, dotted with black grease. A woven doll lay under the Popsicle-stick ligaments of the body’s hand. Natalie lifted the girl’s finger bone to compare the doll’s eyes to the one she found that morning,
but at the same moment she heard twigs on the forest floor snap. Leaves rustled; maybe the wind.