Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

  Jenny reddened. She made his face out through the bright stage lights. He was a true grub. “This next one’s called ‘Scalp The Fat Drunk.’” The crowd hooted, which made her feel a little better. Anne nudged her. She still had her hair covering her face.

  “Don’t sweat it, Jenny,” she whispered. “Let’s do ‘Smoke Signals.’ You’re real good at that one.”

  The crowd was restless, talking and laughing quietly. The tone reminded Jenny of a wake. “This is where we start for real,” she said into the mike. “This one’s called ‘Smoke Signals,’ and it’s dedicated to all the politicians blowing smoke up our collective asses.”

  The same heckler shouted, pointing up to the stage, “You could blow a lot of smoke up those girls’ big collective asses, eh?” Jenny stared down at him. He’d taken his shirt off and wrapped it around his head. His hairy belly jiggled as he laughed with his sunburnt friends. The band kicked into the song. It was supposed to have a tribal rhythm, a beating of the war drum, but Tina was so nervous that she was sounding like an epileptic having a seizure. Jenny leaned to the mike again and began singing scratchily. It was hard to find the beat with the ringing in her ears. There’s smoke signals in the sky, she quacked, her voice shooting back at her from her monitor, There’s little reason asking why. This new song was pathetic. All of them were. It’s big industry polluting the sky / Leaving another child left to cry....

  Jenny was grateful when the song finally ended. A smattering of applause. The audience refused to make eye contact with the band.

  “Now Glenn Miller had a big band,” the fat grub up front shouted to his buddies, making sure to shout loudly enough for Jenny and everyone else to hear too, “but I guess you’d call these chicks a really big band.” Nervous twitters from people around him. “Hey, what’s your band’s name? The Bear Sisters?” Jenny noticed that his few remaining friends were polite enough to turn away from her to laugh.

  Jenny walked over to Anne. The crowd didn’t seem to know what to do with itself. “Do the instrumental,” Jenny said to her. “‘Powwow Highway.’ It might get the crowd dancing.” Anne nodded her hair-covered face, then walked to Tina, then Bertha. They kicked into the song as Jenny walked back to the front of the stage, dangling her microphone so that it nearly touched the ground. She tapped her foot to the music and stared down at the fat man. He stared back at her, smiling, centre stage and six or seven metres dead ahead. The crowd had cleared a small space around him, and he danced theatrically, sticking his tongue out at Jenny and rubbing his belly.

  Jenny smiled back and began to swing her mike in a slow circle, like a stripper with a feather boa. A couple of guys hooted. The band picked up the pace. They actually sounded tight, hitting the right chords hard, surfing along the fast tempo. Jenny swung the microphone faster. The fat man gestured to himself with both hands, mouthing, “Oh, baby,” to her. Jenny was whirling the mike on the end of its cord, picking up speed, as the song reached its crescendo. When the man reached down and squeezed his crotch in mock seduction, Jenny let the mike fly; it sailed like a silver arrow aimed true towards the man. He was still grinning when it hit him square in the forehead with an amplified and hollow BONG.

  Jenny pulled the microphone back in, hand over hand, the screeching of feedback a nice touch, she thought, to the end of the song. She placed the mike back in its grip and stared down at the man. He was sitting on his ass like a fat child, rubbing his forehead. Jenny was halfway to the stage stairs when the clapping started. Just the smack of maybe ten hands together at first. It quickly multiplied so that, by the time she reached the stairs there were hundreds and hundreds of hands clapping, voices rising in shouts and whistles, a beach packed with admirers demanding more. Jenny looked back to the Sisters. They were still standing in place, dumbly staring out at the sea of noise.

  There was nothing else to do; Jenny ran back to the mike and shouted, “This one’s called ‘Burning Down the Bingo Hall.’ Hit it, Sisters.” Jenny growled into the mike as they kicked in fast and hard behind her. The Bingo Hall’s burning / The Bingo Hall is burning / The Bingo Hall is popping balls and it’s burning hot tonight.

  Within a minute a mosh pit had formed, swallowing up the fat man, forty or fifty crazed and happy cottage kids jumping in a circle around him like movie Indians, pumping their fists in the air and howling along. More and more people joined in. Jenny grabbed the mike off the stand and paced the stage, spitting out her words, the words a tribal roar now, flying above the guitar and bass and drums. She spotted Ma on the right, back a ways from the melee and leaning against a birch tree. Wiry grey hair bobbing, Ma tapped her foot fast as she could to the music, grinning big.

  SOUTH

  Ruin

  PAINTED TONGUE

  Painted Tongue cocked his ear to a loon calling from the lake, and it was like a dream, the sound dancing across the big water, the water pulling the sun into it. He laughed to himself.

  I must not talk like Grandfather. Repeat one hundred times. I drink, therefore I am. Repeat. Write it one hundred times on the blackboard, then sit in the corner facing away from the class.

  He laughed to himself again, then took a swig from his mickey of vodka. There was nothing left, so he sucked on the brown bag that held the bottle. He rocked on his boulder and sucked on the bag and hummed a song that his mother used to sing to him at Cedar Point.

  Gnooshenyig go tobogganing. Your grandchildren go tobogganing. Nooshenyig go tobogganing. My grandchildren go tobogganing.

  The words knotted around themselves before they left his tongue, so he flattened the letters with his damaged mouth and turned them into a hum that increased in tone until the sound echoed back across the water towards the loon. Painted Tongue hummed louder to remember his mother’s song until the story

  in the song came back to him, the story of children sledding and falling through the weak ice of a river, the song of warning to children who acted foolishly with friends who didn’t listen to the warnings of their mothers. He was drunk. He had a righteous buzz and wanted a drink. He wanted a drink so bad it made him shake, but the humming helped stop the shakes for a little while at least.

  The boulder that he sat on was his boulder.

  Let someone try to take it away, goddammit. I will cut your throat from ear to ear and count coup upon you, motherfucker.

  This was his boulder on the lake, removed from the confusion of downtown, the rock heavy and squat and thick with a little natural chair cut into it at such an angle that he didn’t have to see the ugliness of people, just the water and the sun dancing upon the water. This was Painted Tongue’s rock, and he’d defended his turf against stinking hobo invaders. He’d counted many coup against them with rocks and broken bottles and his fists, and now this was his rock. Painted Tongue stopped his humming as a jogger in very white sneakers ran by behind him along the railroad tracks, the jogger turning his head away from this man who defended his rock, this man with long straight black hair and the crooked nose of a warrior.

  You are a coward! Painted Tongue wanted to shout. The way you turn your eyes from me as you cross my rock. Don’t run near here anymore.

  When the man had run away, Painted Tongue cocked his ear again, this time to the clang and chug of a train leaving the train yard far to his left. The five thirty p.m. Go Train express to Oshawa. A warrior didn’t need a clock to tell him what time it was. All he needed was to listen and watch the things around him.

  When the sun was gone he would make his way back downtown to hustle change with his cup. His bottle was long empty and his lips were dry, and soon it would be time for dry lips to move downtown. Everything travelled in a circle. The sun, the moon, joggers, the world. Today already Painted Tongue had been hustling change at the corner of Dundas Street and Bay. He’d made enough by mid-afternoon to buy the mickey of vodka. He’d walked down Bay and underneath the moan and echo of the expressway, across the train tracks and to the crown of his boulder, far enough away from the electricity and noise of dow
ntown, to where he could imagine for a time that he was back at home, back in the bush. And very soon he’d do his route again. Life hadn’t always been this way, but memories of the rez dropped as fast as the sinking sun.

  Oh my brothers and sisters, Painted Tongue hummed to himself. The old ways die in the face of the new. They have taken our land, broken every promise, raised the price on a pint of booze and a case of beer, made it near impossible to afford a pack of smokes. Repeat one hundred times. Write it out on the blackboard five hundred times, then sit in the corner facing away from the class and throw up between your legs.

  The lake had nearly swallowed the sun now. Maybe tonight Painted Tongue would finally find Kyle Root. Kyle was the only friend he had from Cedar Point who’d made it to the city and stayed. And besides, Kyle owed him money. Kyle was a painter, an artist who could afford anything he wanted now and who lived in a loft in the warehouse district with pretty white women and pine furniture and a kitchen made of steel. Kyle wore suit jackets with his jeans, his hair combed back and neat in a ponytail held by a silver Haida thunderbird. He’d first made it big with a series of portraits of Painted Tongue: Painted Tongue standing in a field with his bow raised to the sun, Painted Tongue leaping from a tall building and transforming into an eagle, Painted Tongue surfing a river with arms outstretched on the bow tip of a fancy canoe. Kyle was his best friend. He and Kyle used to run through summer back at the Point when they were five and six and seven, always with no shirts on, swinging lacrosse sticks and whipping pebbles at each other. They’d had a game. They’d sneak up on stray reservation dogs and smack the dogs’ asses hard as they could with their lacrosse sticks. The winner was the one whose dog howled loudest. They’d always argued about which dog was uglier. Kyle used to read to Painted Tongue about their cousins, the Sioux, how they counted coup on their enemies, how they got close enough to touch them in battle. To count coup on one’s enemy made the warrior a great man. Painted Tongue’s stomach suddenly cramped hard, making him shiver with a closed mouth. It was time to make the circle.

  He stood up slowly on the dome of his rock, humming a song to the departing sun, and got bad headspins. He stumbled and fell head-first, imagining for a moment that he was flying until the bright pain of his nose crunching on smaller rocks made him think he was swimming deep, deep under water.

  Painted Tongue awoke in the hospital, surrounded by bright lights and men in green doctor’s pants and nurses in white. He tried to leave quietly, but they wouldn’t let him. He grew angry and hummed his war song whenever a doctor or nurse approached his cot. I will count coup upon you, skinny brown doctor man, he hummed. I am not even afraid to wrestle your fat white nurse who calls me heathen. Painted Tongue still had a righteous buzz and the pills they gave him made it roar. He hummed louder and louder, increasing the burn of the new stitches on his nose that they had given him while he was unconscious.

  You can do the paperwork if you want to call the psych ward, Painted Tongue heard one doctor say to the other as he hummed and rocked on his bed and stared them down. As he was about to leave again, a doctor who was older than the others appeared from the hall, asking, What’s the problem here?

  He sat on the end of Painted Tongue’s bed and spoke. He was the first man in a long time who didn’t speak down to him, but spoke, without staring into Painted Tongue’s eyes, directly to him. You’re lucky a jogger found you and called the police, the doctor said. He was white but his nose looked very much like Painted Tongue’s normally did. Have you considered leaving the city and going back to your home? Why don’t you stay at the Harvest House on King Street if you don’t want to go home? Painted Tongue listened politely. You get drunk and hurt yourself again, and I’ll make sure you get institutionalized, the doctor said before letting Painted Tongue go. He knew the doctor meant it.

  All last spring, summer and winter and again into this spring, Painted Tongue had held onto the chain-link fence and watched the construction workers swarming inside a big pit below him near the waterfront. He’d hum, There are four or five good workers among you. The rest are lazy shits who don’t know how to work the foremen, and the foremen don’t know how to work a crew. He hummed this until the hum had become a song that he’d moan every day as the construction in the pit reached street level then grew higher with the seasons. Now the building was almost finished.

  He’d watched these men from the very beginning, these sunburnt, windburnt workies straying too close to his turf by the railway tracks, these men gouging a huge empty lot until it was a pit, then framing and pouring concrete all last summer, creating a foundation for something too big, it seemed, for the earth’s back to bear. Almost every day for this whole last year, Painted Tongue had taken his walk around the site’s perimeter, along the sidewalk that circled it like a huge track, stepping slowly so that a footfall was timed to hit the sidewalk every two seconds. I am a well-tuned clock, Painted Tongue hummed. Left foot, stop, one-two. Right foot, stop, one-two. He’d take a long and measured stride, stop and count, then stride again, stop and count. He walked slowly, exactly, to measure the distance around the site. He walked this way to try to slow down the people rushing all around him. Everybody always seemed in a hurry. Every day he walked the same route in his manner, the crowds on the sidewalk parting like a river around a boat’s hull. He ignored the odd looks and laughing and catcalls of Whisky Joe or crazy drunk or fruitcake. The people in this city were not capable of understanding.

  It took Painted Tongue ninety minutes to walk the site’s perimeter. He’d never witnessed so big a job, so huge a building being born from men and cement mixers and steel girders and cranes. Every day over the last few seasons the walls of the building had grown higher, as if they were being pulled by magic from the tired skin of the earth. Painted Tongue liked to stop after his walk and watch the men work; he recognized the good ones from the lazy at a distance. He was keeper of the secret of their daily progress. Now they were almost finished. The good and the lazy were almost finished.

  Today Painted Tongue stood in his usual place at the site, the start and end of his daily walk around the construction, his hands above his head and holding onto the chain-link fence. His nose throbbed from last night’s fall. He brought one hand down to his nose as he stared up at the workies scrambling around on the building, the workies straining and shouting and jackhammering the last of the domed roof into place. A large white bandage over Painted Tongue’s nose concealed the zigzag of six stitches running the bridge. The pain pills had made him feel almost weightless, like a crow’s wing, but now they were all gone. Last night’s fall had been a good thing, he thought. It had loosened up some memories in his head.

  That this huge building was round as a medicine wheel was no surprise to him. Nothing in the world existed without a reason. He stared up at the white dome roof, curved like an egg, curved like something he could still not quite figure. The big sign on the other side said in blue letters as tall as a person that this was a stadium, a dome for men to play in and for spectators to cheer. For the last two months Painted Tongue had felt an ugly fear, a wolf spider, creeping up his back. All fear made no sense, and this was no different. Painted Tongue was afraid of the day the men would finish construction, of the day they would pack up their tools and leave this new thing completed. Maybe it was the falling and the pills that were now helping him to recognize just what it was the men were building. His gut tightened in awe and fear.

  Painted Tongue began his slow, long strides around the structure. His nose throbbed with each step. The pills were all gone. He glanced over to the site once in a while, then looked back quickly to the ground in front of him, trying to capture the essence of this stadium in the corner of his eye. His mother had once taught him a little trick. If you are trying to remember something, she said, and it is on the tip of your tongue, do not try to force the memory out, for very little good comes from force. Think of other things. Forget what you are trying to remember, and that memory will soon get lonely a
nd come back to you.

  Painted Tongue reached the first big curve and again peered quickly towards the dome. Nothing. He went back to the day he’d made a little boy, a small blond boy, cry. It was downtown near the entrance to First Canadian Place where Painted Tongue often sat on a piece of cardboard collecting change. He watched the boy walk along the crowded sidewalk towards him, clutching his pretty mother’s hand. The boy stared at Painted Tongue, at his face and then at his paper cup containing a few coins. As they got nearer, the boy pulled on his mom’s arm, trying to get her attention, trying to get her to look at the Indian crouching on the sidewalk surrounded by all the white men in business suits and the ladies who wore pretty dresses with sneakers. Painted Tongue spent his life watching. He knew from the boy’s eyes all these thoughts he was thinking. The mother ignored the child’s tugs.

  As the two passed, the little boy held his nose. Painted Tongue screwed up his face and pursed his lips in an O, then blew hard through his mouth. He made his face mimic the Iroquois mask, the Wind Spirit, he’d once seen at the Native Canadian Centre at Spadina and Bloor. The boy’s eyes widened at the sight of the man with long black hair and a warrior’s crooked nose and pockmarked skin. The boy wailed in fear and Painted Tongue felt the surge along his spine. The mix of sadness and victory made him want a gulp of vodka.

  He saw his own eyes in the boy’s. When Painted Tongue had been one year old he’d gotten thrush. He wouldn’t stop crying. He remembered even now with his pill-fuzzy head as he walked his slow walk around the site, his mother holding him, whispering, Gdaakwos na? Kaagiijtooge na? Are you sick? Do you have an earache? And finally, quietly angry, Aabiish ogaabinjibayin? Where do you come from?

  His mother told him stories later of bringing him to the reservation doctor who gave him a needle, then to the band’s old medicine woman who told his mother to take him into the sweat lodge and hold him tight against her bare chest.