Indian Country Noir Page 8

  Then Jake bursts out, "I don't care! I'd rather have the army haircut!"

  Shana laughs, and I do too. Laughing over the hurt. Laughing while I try to pull off Tommy's play pants with him wiggling like a minnow.

  Shana says, "At least you're thinking about getting an Indian haircut now. So you wanna figure out what a puffball mushroom is? I can see one from here!"

  She's so good with him. Jake's bouncing around now. He finds this giant puffball. It's as big as a bear paw, if a bear had a white Ontario Place dome mushroom kind of foot. And she's explaining how it's good to eat, but you want to eat the smaller kind because the big ones get yellow and mushy inside.

  "You should only get mushrooms with me or your dad, because you could get mixed up with other ones, like the Death Cap or Destroying Angel."

  "Destroying Angel! I want that one! I'd bring it to school!"

  "No, you wouldn't. It would make you throw up and then it would kill you."

  Tommy's pants aren't so bad under his play pants. I pull the play pants back up and let him splash in the puddles again.

  I touch my hair. I don't know why I grew my hair after I got out of jail. It just seemed like the most rebellious thing I could do when the rest of me was heading mainstream. I've lost jobs because of it. But I never thought it might make me lose my son. I don't know why things are so hard between its. I don't know how far I would go to keep him.

  While I'm thinking this, Tom yelps. He's wandered away from me to the edge of the trail and he's skidding on a fallen branch.

  I dive. Yank up on his arm. He screams like I've ripped it out of its socket and falls in another mud puddle anyway.

  Shana sprints to our side with Jake behind her yelling, "What is it?"

  Tom is bawling and trying to fight me off. I'm doing my best, but he is damn strong for a two-year-old and it's all I can do to hold onto him when he's muddy and slippery and screaming.

  Finally, he calms down and lets me hold him, but he's not using his left arm. It's just hanging there.

  We take him to the emergency room. Wait there for three hours. Jake gets bored. He keeps asking for stuff, so Shana brings him magazines and candy bars and answers his nonstop questions, everything from "Why is your nose so big?" to "You think there are any of those destroyer mushrooms around here?"

  Jake sure talks a lot for an Indian. I didn't say a word until I was two and neither did my brothers. Maybe that's his mother's side coming out. He always talks to Shana, though. It's like he doesn't know what to say to me, or maybe his grandma has his head turned too far against me.

  I keep holding Tom. He drinks some 7-Up and wanders a bit, touching magazines and toys with his right arm, but he mostly just wants to sit in my lap. I'm okay with that.

  When we finally get to see the doctor, a pretty Asian woman in glasses, she talks way too fast and I don t get most of it. She pulls on Tommy's arm and twists it at the elbow and he gasps, but then she's like, "Can you use it, Tommy? Wanna touch my stethoscope?" After a minute, he reaches for Jake's toy motorcycle with his left arm. She says something about how one of Tom's arm bones isn't grown and something about a ligament slipping, but I don't care what except Tommy's arm is okay.

  He turns to me and says, "Burger?"

  When the phone rings and it's my lawyer, I know it's a problem. He sighs down the line. "What happened to your son Thomas?"

  I explain about the fall and the emergency room and how he was fine and ate two kid's burgers afterward. But my stomach has more knots than my old golden retriever's tail.

  "You have to tell me about this kind of thing."

  "Why? He was okay." My heart is pounding even as I say it.

  "Because your ex's mother already has her lawyer organized on charges of physical abuse-"

  "Abuse?" My parents were so screwed up after being beaten up at residential schools, I would let my boys run me over with a truck before I raised a hand to them.

  He says more stuff, like the boys were dirty when they came home and we feed them junk.

  I can hardly talk. Shana takes the phone away from me and scribbles notes. She's good at stuff like that.

  Dumb old Fred. Dumb old Indian. Suckered by the system again.

  Before we can figure it out, Mrs. Saunders has it rigged so we have to have "supervised visits" with my boys. We're even supposed to pay for some chaperone. We don't have the money.

  "So I can't see my boys?" I ask my lawyer.

  He sighs and says, "I know some supervision visitation providers who don't charge that much. Maybe your band council can help you out."

  I press the phone against my jaw. The construction season's almost over and Shana's saving up her waitress tips for school. I wouldn't ask her to spend more on my boys anyway. We could hardly afford the Happy Meals, but we did it because the toys made them smile and maybe think of its a little before they broke. I can hardly get the words out. "I don't think so. Can't you fight this?"

  "I've got a lot of cases on the go, Fred, but I'll try and make this a priority. At least get you down to nonprofessional supervision provider so you don't have to pay for it."

  Great. I start squeezing the phone receiver so hard I imagine the plastic splintering in my fist. "How 'bout the fact that I didn't do nothin'!"

  More sighing. "I know, Fred."

  Sure you will, white man. It's a real "priority" for you. I got to do my own thing.

  Shana puts up with me for the next week while I try to figure out what to do. I'm not eating, I can't sleep, I'm walking around in the middle of the night and getting up at 6 to work. I even try to split up a tree that fell down two years ago in Shana's backyard. It's a messy job. I break the chain saw. I'm pretty useless with an axe. But I'm not drinking. And I'm not using.

  "Sorry," I tell Shana when, for the first time, she wants to have sex and I just want to crash.

  "It's okay." She kisses my cheek. "Just do the dishes for the next week and I'll forgive you."

  That makes my eyes pop open. But she simply laughs and drags the covers over me. The quilt is soft. I sleep. And Saturday morning, when I should be seeing my boys, I know what to do instead. Go see Phil.

  White people love to talk about native elders, but they're hard to come by. My parents were so screwed up by the schools where nuns beat them for speaking Mohawk or priests raped them just because they felt like it. My grandparents are dead and I don't really know the elders. They probably wouldn't understand my baby Mohawk anyway.

  But I know Phil. He's a smart old guy. He used to have a job at CN Rail before he worked his way up at the paper mill and then retired on good money when the mill closed. Now he writes for the local paper. So I drop by the diner. Shana brings its coffee on the house.

  Phil pushes his paper aside and asks, "What can I do you for?"

  In a low voice, under the grill's sizzle and plates clattering and chairs bumping, I tell him what's going on.

  He pours two creams and two sugars in his coffee and stirs it around until he finally answers. "She's in a lot of pain."

  "Who?" For a second I think he means Shana, whose long legs just walked by.

  "The grandmother."

  "The grandmother? Come on, Phil, you going to side with a white woman instead of me?"

  He shakes his head. "Not taking sides. I think she just has a lot of hurt and she's taking it out on you. Probably ever since her daughter died. She had Noelle late, a change-of-life baby, if I remember right."

  I stare at him. Who is he, Sigmund friggin' Freud? Who cares how old she was when she had Noelle? "So what do you think I should do?"

  "Get rid of that hurt. Then she won't hate you so much."

  What a wise guy. I feel like hurling my coffee cup at him. I only put it down gently because it's Shana's place. "Thanks a lot." I sling a ten on the table.

  "You've got to solve this yourself," he calls to my back.

  Yeah. I knew that already.

  DEATH NOTICE

  Saunders, Francine (nee Ferguson).
Passed away on November 10, 2009. Survived by her grandsons, Jake and Thomas Redish. Predeceased by her daughter, Noelle, and husband, Jacob.

  It should be a good Christmas. The best ever, in fact. One of my buddies gave me a tree, said it was a cast-off because of the dead needles. Shana rigged it so you can't even see the brown bits. She and Jake are hanging the balls, and Tommy and I are throwing tinsel at it. Mel Torme's roasting chestnuts over an open fire, and things would be just perfect except for a few things.

  I was going to take care of Mrs. Saunders. I really was. I wanted to bash her head in, but in the end I decided Phil was right. I set up an appointment with one of our mediation counselors. Mrs. Saunders would never set foot in Akwasasne, let alone allow an Indian tell her what to do, but all I could do was try.

  Until she upped and died. She seemed okay, or at least her normal mean self, sending the boys to bed without any veg stew supper after Jake gave her "too much lip." Then she made them go to church the next morning with a neighbor. Said she wasn't feeling good.

  They came home to find her dead in her own puke. The neighbor called 911, but it was too late; they took her to the emergency room anyway. We asked for no autopsy. Because she was almost seventy and had a heart condition, the coroner dropped it.

  Sometimes I wish he hadn't.

  Maybe I'm too suspicious. But I looked up what mushrooms do to you. The real deadly kind. You feel okay for twelve hours and then you start puking. You end up going pretty quick.

  "Daddy!" Jake hollers, holding up the box of my mom's old Christmas stuff. "This one stinks! I think it's the candle!"

  "Throw it out, then," I suggest. I'm looking at how he and Shana have their heads close together. Their hair is growing back, but Shana shaved both their heads after Mrs. Saunders died.

  "I'll just throw out the candle," Shana says, and I smile at her because I still love her and she's such a good mother to my boys, even though I get goose bumps every time I see her butch hair.

  Tommy tugs my pants. He wants me to kneel down. I do. He clambers in my arms and I lift him up to hang tinsel on high. His prickly little hair stands straight up now. He asked Shana to cut it off when she did his brother's.

  I'm the only one who kept a crew cut. I feel really guilty. I don't know why. But when Tommy hugs me and Shana asks me to help Jake with the star, I can't help humming along with old Mel Torme. Shana looks cute with short hair, kind of '80s punk rock. And Jake trusts me enough to hold him high while he crowns the tree with a silver and gold star.

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  saw Jimmy earlier this week. Just before the discovery of yet another fallen victim to the drowning way. He was still the same Jimmy, drunk-wasted. Crouched on the curb across from the market with a half-dozen longtime cronies and their women. Women who have been on the down edge so long their bodies have masculinized and hunched with the depression of life lost to drink, hard sex, smoke.

  I saw him and I remembered Jolene, her beautiful smiling face, shining hair. Thought of her unrelinquished love for a man who'd only one wife in his heart. Thought of this bottle he'd fully committed to, of his smell, his ways. How she must have longed for him. Leaving her there the way he did, looking down on her maybe, thinking he was quite the man for taking the young passionate breath she'd had, in his making over of her brown body. Thought of his sudden losses of memory, and willingness to go on in life so soon and in such close proximity to her passing, and I wondered if he ever as much as poured a drink on the ground in her memory, or if he held that drink so precious to himself even a gulp would be too much to spare.

  I saw him and I watched the walkers, those who've taken to carrying signs and speaking out against the assailants they believe they'll recognize once they stay the vigil until another passing. And I remembered how Jolene was always a private woman and doubted she would show her smiling face in a crowd this immense-especially among the sober living. The waters may look still today, but each time I glance across the creek, use my peripheral vision, for a moment her easy presence forms here, waiting. It's here I leave some hope for her, a few presents now and then, and ask her to go easy on us-the living. Here, too, I vow to follow him, take him down to the water one night, bring her Southern Comfort.

  Jolene came to mind just this morning, how the light illuminated the walking bridge rail above her resplendent body. The shining of her deep black hair, under the water, on the morning they found her two dozen years ago. Right here in the thick of Brooklyn Alley. Just west/northwest from the Double Door Inn and over from the Broken Bank, Marshall Park. I remember how she always smiled when asking for "just a few quarters to get by."

  It was spring. Jolene, though barely grown, had already been married and separated twice. She had a young child, but her parents had taken custody in the recognition of her spirit gone to drink. She had lived among the other ghosts, friends still walking the Earth along Independence, panhandling, selling themselves, huddling together for warmth and for desire of the strange flesh necessary to endure the jaundiced and rotting skin they themselves wore. Those who had lost lives here already, and yet still breathed, still continued this walk among the living. The ones whose blood no longer held hemoglobin, red, nor white leukocyte to speak of, yet flowed with a powerful wine-red fire-rush of alcohol-permeated heat. Those whose tears bore no salt, yet swelled each time a lost love was mentioned in conversation. Worse still if one actually passed by, nonchalant, unknowing, a member of the living world still. Those who fill the deep underworld here, though the whitecollars cannot see them.

  Jolene had found a lover. A great man, great in size and truly experienced among these parts. His residency here dated back a good decade or more, since his mom was chain gang in South Carolina. Heard she died there. I knew him holding his own guts in his hands. Knew him to be unstoppable. He walked with a certainty. A macho strut. He was certain-of himself, of the drink he made vows with. Everybody knew him. This familiarity, this personal community knowledge, allowed her protection from the perpetrators who infiltrated the Brooklyn-side Charlotte streets on weekends, summers, and holidays. Those who came to prey on the already forgotten but not quite gone. Those who justified rolling drunks as "teaching them a lesson." Or roughing lobs to "make them understand." Ethnic cleansers. I despise them.

  It was in the month of the eclipsed moon, that time of reddened sky, after a fresh rain and hail pummeling along the curb. Jolene and her man. They were along the newly constructed revision bank when the storm broke. They had gone into the bar to avoid the wetness and to engage some draws from the deep tap-well, at least until the panhandled earnings were exhausted.

  They say when the lovers went back down the construction path, Jolene was so taken by the deepening colors of the flora around them, she swelled with passion in the green and purpled midst and they lay together in the wet grasses along the bank, experiencing the fullness of newborn spring. They say she slept there. Fell asleep during, some say. When they found her she was naked from the waist down, as brown as a summer doe, lying half-in and half-out of water. The half-in was the upper part of Jolene. They dragged her out by the bare heels poking up through the wild violets blooming.

  You know, she smiled even in death and her heavy hair flowed far past her physical body, much as the water flowed behind her. Jimmy was questioned but never arrested in her passing. He suffered from blackouts and seizures, and couldn't recall the last he saw her the night before. He was so sure she had returned to the bar with him. So were a few other regulars. They were all certain they saw her at least two hours after the coroner determined her expiration. They recounted Jolene hanging onto Jimmy's arm and smelling his breath and neck as if it were something scintillating. No one remembered her speaking, though Willie Notches said she tried to steal a cigarette right from his brother Tyrone's pocket but was so intoxicated she couldn't grab hold of it. Said his cousin Punchy Blackknees walked by and put a cigarette into her hand and she thought he was handing her a grasshopper since the clumsy num
bness made the end shake up and down. Willie still laughed at the recollection. Others said they had seen her swimming near the city center at dawn, where elders and children were allowed to fish before the conversion of the city into cosmopolis. Said they averted their eyes to avoid embarrassing her obvious bathing. The city more concerned with gentrification than the fallen, then and now. Nothing was done. No follow-up, just over and buried, they say. They still claim such. Amazing.

  Years passed. Winos would sometimes claim they saw a beautiful woman, underwater, facing up and smiling in the now white-collar park enclave. Back then, they'd leaned over and fallen in trying to get a better look at her before the shock of cold water woke them from drunken stupor. Then there was Tyrone. The creek-bum who hadn't seen a sober day in so many years his skin had grayed beyond redemption. Tyrone drank with Jimmy, for years they say, drank with Jolene once or twice in the living time. It was Tyrone whose death bristled my attention. Tyrone had claimed it was Jolene in the waters. Claimed she reached right out of the water for the Marlboro in his shirt and held him a moment, puckering wet lips and beckoning him with her muddy eyes. He said he'd shaken her off twice before and was afraid she would come for him again. He told Jimmy he believed her jealous of the woman Tyrone had introduced to Jimmy while he should have still been mourning her. As if the ones who lived on this bordering world were capable of remaining celibate for a year's time to mourn anyone. He drowned four years after they found Jolene. He surfaced around Freedom Park, no explaining it, the pocket completely ripped from his shirt and his trousers torn through the crotch, one entire pant leg missing.

  Then there was that one up from the Catawba River for the Frontier Days rodeo. They said he looked and walked a lot like Jimmy and that he had drunk in the Double Door three days straight before going to "get some sleep" by the pond path. They said his breath had the strong smell of Peppermint Schnapps or Hot Damn over bad beer and cheap wine. Said the peppermint was the only thing kept him from getting picked up P.I. by Officer Wall on his lot patrol at the market. He surfaced exactly four years after Tyrone. After him, they came up more often.