Born With a Tooth

by Joseph Boyden

  “A sasquatch?” the interviewer repeats with disbelief.

  “Yeah, you know, a Bigfoot. All hair and stinky and shit.”

  “And after that,” Jeremy pipes in, “he turned himself into a mutt and Xavier threw a rock at him and hit him in the ass so hard he was limping the next day.”

  “And before that, he was a crow,” Elijah adds, grabbing the microphone with his meaty fist. “And he spied on Old Lady Koostachin walking around naked in her house.” The interviewer doesn’t know what to say.

  “Who is this Xavier who seems to be such a vital player in the unfolding drama?” he finally asks when Elijah gives him the microphone back.

  “Xavier, he’s our buddy,” Jeremy says. “We all helped him raise Dink since he was just a little kid ’cause he’s got no family.”

  “And Dink dates, or should I say was dating Xavier’s sister Gloria,” Christine says, “until he got all freaky on her and beat her up a few times. That’s when Xavier and two of his brothers beat the shit out of Dink.”

  “And Dink stabbed Antoine in revenge,” Elijah adds. “Because Antoine is Xavier’s spirit teacher.”

  The interviewer gets a gleam in his eye suddenly. “So what we have here is a classic example of good versus evil playing itself out in front of us. You heard it here first,” the announcer says, looking straight into the camera. “A battle of darkness versus light, man versus manimal. All of our prayers tonight go out to Antoine Hookimaw, medicine man, healer, struck down in cold blood by a shape-shifter. This is Bill Blair, reporting live from Annunciation House Reservation in the Ontario wilderness.” The camera and lights shut off and Bill Blair hands the mike to his assistant and asks the three where he can find me.

  “Well, if you look right there, you could ask him yourself, eh,” Christine says, pointing to me. Bill Blair looks to me and I shake my head no. He calls to his cameraman to start rolling and grabs his mike back. Lights flash onto me and I dart quick as I can through the hospital doors. I turn to see the crew following me in and the police stopping them, the camera on me. I can just see my picture on the news tonight, looking scared, a caption under it reading, “Xavier Rabbit.”

  Over the next couple of days I expect things to die down, but the craziness only increases. There’s a carnival atmosphere on the reserve, little kids running around and jumping up and down in front of the cameras, long-haired and dirty-faced. Some of the warrior types are taking potshots at any poor crow or reservation mutt that comes into sight. There must be enough film shot of the reserve to make a documentary about it by now. But still no Dink.

  As it turns out, Gloria and I are close seconds to Dink in terms of people wanting interviews. Bill Blair has hit on the angle, and since Antoine, the good side in the epic struggle, is still unconscious, we’ve taken his place. We hide out at my home with the curtains drawn, sneaking around after dark to visit friends.

  Gloria is getting antsy for other reasons as well. Whenever she peeks out the curtains to see who’s around and spots a dog or bird, she’s worried it’s him.

  While we’re eating dinner, a big housefly lands on the table between Gloria and me. It walks around like it owns the place and, if we didn’t know better, acts like it’s studying us.

  “Do you think Dink could turn into a fly or a bug if he wanted to?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, shaking my fork at the fly. It doesn’t move.

  “Say that fly’s Dink,” Gloria says. “Do you think he’s seeing us like a fly does right now? I mean, does he see a whole bunch of me like in a kaleidoscope, like flies do, or does he see just one of me, big as a mountain, looking down at him?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Do you think he sees this napkin?” I flick my napkin and squash the fly into a gooey blob of black and yellow on the table. “Do you think that would sting if it was Dink?” I ask. We both look at each other and laugh.

  The manhunt for Dink has grown from a few tribal cops scouring the bush to a detail of OPP with dogs and a command post just off reserve. Since Dink is possibly on Crown land, the OPP say they have to be involved. Media coverage seems to make them nervous and official. All of us who know Dink laugh at the idea of the Provincial Police being able to find him, even with dogs. Dink is a master. If the dogs pick up his scent, they won’t be able to stay on it for long, considering all the muskeg and rivers Dink knows about.

  What’s more dangerous for Dink than dogs is the limelight. We all know he must be going crazy out there, watching the lights and cameras and the reporters who want him. Not wanting to blow all those chances to boast in front of the cameras is what the smart ones are betting will lure him in.

  It takes the police a couple of days of interviewing witnesses and of having officers coming in from the bush exhausted and bitten half to death by blackflies before they recognize the trap at their disposal. Dink is starving out there, not for food but for the attention he’s always wanted. Be patient enough, the cops come to realize, and the fox won’t be able to resist any longer. He’ll be drawn in by the media he’s responsible for bringing here in the first place.

  Dink surprises me by coming in sooner than I predicted. It’s sunset, four nights after Antoine’s stabbing, and Antoine is still in intensive care and not able to talk. His heartbeat’s so weak that they can’t even fly him out. But I make sure to be by his bedside whenever they let me, trying to nurse him back with my stories.

  Dink appears with the sun setting behind his shoulder, highlighting his pompadour and the swarm of bugs that have taken to it like a halo around him. He walks straight up to the band office and is circled so quick by camera crews and interviewers that the police have trouble getting to him.

  “I want to talk,” he shouts, and the OPP start moving in on him, pushing through the crowd like hungry wolves. The Nishnabe-Aski see what’s going on, see that the OPP are trying to undermine their power in front of the spotlight. The tribal sergeant shouts out, “OPP, you are commanded to stand down on Cree territory,” but is ignored. Indians start grumbling immediately, getting tussled out of the way by beefy white cops. Dink stands in the middle of the pushing crowd like a raccoon in headlights, blinded and staring. He regains his composure and tries to speak. The cops rush in and grab him roughly, throwing him onto the ground on his stomach. Kneeling on his back, they handcuff him.

  “This isn’t a press conference,” the OPP sergeant shouts, as much for the ears of the TV crews as for Dink’s. The police have no choice but to drag him through the pack of cameras and lights and angry Indians.

  “Let me talk,” Dink shouts as he is forced along to a waiting police cruiser. “This is all for me!” When he shouts that, I don’t think there’s an Indian on reserve who doesn’t feel sorry for sad little Dink at that moment.

  The cops drag him right past me. He sees me and tries to say something to me. I reach a hand to him but he’s stuffed head-first into the cruiser. They slam the door and the Dink I knew when I was young, the scared little kid always being picked on and beat up, is staring out the window at me.

  “Change,” I mouth to him through the closed window. He just stares back at me with pleading eyes. “Change,” I whisper again. The cruiser takes off, spitting gravel at me.

  It doesn’t take long for things to get back to normal. Dink not doing something dramatic like turning into a mad bear or rabid wolf was a letdown for the newspeople. When they saw the story was going to be wrecked by a slow court system with no understanding of pacing, they packed up their gear and got off reserve. The OPP took Dink down south to a medium-security holding facility to await trial.

  Slowly, Antoine started feeling better. They took him out of intensive care and put him in a normal room. I visited him every day and told him stories, slowly bringing him back to health. It was a proud moment for me when he admitted that my stories had helped him regain consciousness. “I just couldn’t lie there no more, listening to you go on with the same stories over and over again. I could either die to e
scape it, or wake up so I could tell you to be quiet. I chose waking up.”

  After a while, Antoine was able to sit up. We talked about all the crazy events of the summer. One day, Antoine said, “You know, I don’t blame Francis for what he did to me. There was a lot of pressure on him. He was always the underdog and all he wanted was some recognition. He just got involved with the wrong kind. That can happen.”

  I nodded. “I can’t picture him doing too well in a cell,” I said. “He’s a bush man. Being locked up will kill him.” It was Antoine’s turn to nod.

  “I’ll speak at his trial,” Antoine said. “Tell the courts what they want to hear. Tell them a story about evil windigo spirits entering Francis’ body, and when I was trying to exorcise them it was them who stabbed me and not Francis. It’ll work. I’ll tell them I don’t want no charges pressed.”

  I knew it would work, too.

  But there wasn’t a chance for a trial to happen. A month and a half after Dink’s capture, he just disappeared from the prison. The police were baffled. There was another manhunt, but it couldn’t turn up a single lead. The media got stirred again for a little while. The detention centre was asked a lot of questions but couldn’t come up with any answers. Over time, Dink was forgotten, just like he had been all his life. But everyone around here knew what had happened to him, or thought they did. There was talk of a Cree Indian inmate who swore he saw Dink turn into a crow in a corner of the exercise yard and fly away. The guy had a shiny black feather that he said came from Dink to prove it.

  Not much proof, some would say. But for the ones around here, it was plenty.

  MEN DON’T ASK

  Not long after she’s finally made her decision to do it, Sylvina is visited by a dream, a memory of her childhood. It is the memory of walking in on her mother and a man who was not her father wrestling half-naked on the couch. Sylvina was only four, and ran up and slapped the man’s bare ass hard, shouting, “Get off my mother! Don’t hurt my mother!” The man rose up and walked towards Sylvina, his big thing bobbing, angry at her. He smacked her with such force that she hit the wall. Her mother rose up screaming at him, calling him “bastard” and commanding him to leave. Sylvina remembers being cradled by her mother, squeezed against her brown sagging breasts, fighting the panic of suffocation. She awakes with her face in the pillow, rolls over and takes a gulp of air.

  She can’t fall back asleep, so she lights a smoke. Her husband is not in bed with her, she sees. No surprise. She wonders what could have summoned up that memory from the deep lake in her head. Her father left before her fifth birthday, and she never saw him again. Back when she was four and five, it was hard not to feel that she somehow was to blame. Sylvina thinks back to her mother and the different men who shared her bed after Father left. She fights the urge to try and compare the number against her own. The fear of slowly reliving her mother’s life here on Moose Factory, day after day, week after week, year after year, keeps her far from finding sleep again. It is what has driven her to make this awful decision.

  The pilot has no idea, Sylvina knows. No idea of what she’s about to leave behind for him. He flies planes up to Moosonee, and a helicopter back and forth across the river during freezeup, delivering passengers and supplies from Moosonee on the mainland to Moose Factory Island.

  Her island. Her reserve. This place she so desperately wants to escape. She likes the pilot because he’s tall and has a nice ass and doesn’t talk much, like all the other white pilots. The other white pilots who come up for a couple of months each year to make money and the local girls. There’s more to him, she guesses. More than this tall, silent type he tries so hard to be. Yeah, he’s trying. Sylvina sees the tiny cracks in his act, like little fissures in the black river ice separating Moose Factory from the rest of the world. But still, he might be her ticket. She needs something to cut this invisible snare that tightens around her neck just a little more each day.

  A couple of times now when he’s taken her out, personally flown her in the company chopper over to Moosonee for beers at the Osprey, he’s asked if she thinks he’s cute, if he pleases her in bed. Men don’t ask. Not the men Sylvina has known. They don’t need to. They might have a beer gut or pockmarked face or rotten teeth, but every single man she’s ever known knew in his heart that he was the man, the one. All the men Sylvina has known are warriors, little northern Geronimos.

  The pilot’s different. Oh, he tries to show the world that he is the man. But there’s that hesitation, like a motor with shot timing. If she’s anything, Sylvina’s a seer. A watcher. She’s good at reading men. The pilot was a sweet boy once who knew he was sweet and used it to get women. Now he’s reached the age where the sweetness is an act and he must find another gig or risk becoming a hustler flyboy in the five years that cushion him from middle age. One night at the Osprey, drinking, Sylvina suddenly thinks that maybe she is the gig he’s looking for. His very own Anishnaabe woman, still slim, with pretty black hair, who looks ten years younger than her thirty-four, only tiny pale rivers on her lower belly giving away the secret of her two daughters. The one thing Sylvina knows for sure is that one day she will be her old mother, seeing the world through watery eyes. This knowledge frightens her. There must be something more than this out there in the pilot’s world, something more than this little life of hers in Moose Factory, which flies by as she watches.

  The river freezes hard and the pilot tells her it’s time. The cars and trucks can drive across the river on an ice road, and this has taken away all of his business. It’s a strange start to this winter, one only the oldest on the reserve can remember happening before. The air has turned cold but the skies refuse to give any snow. Other winters the snow is already a metre or more high, the old men on reserve tell one another. This is a bad sign. The moose get confused and don’t come out of the bush. The hunting will be very bad. Many hungry mouths in the old days. Sylvina’s mother listens to the old men, warns Sylvina of the omen. Sylvina just laughs.

  The pilot wants to fly his little plane back to his home and help a friend out at his shop, doing mechanic work until the ice decides to break up and people up here need him again. He wants to leave now, tonight, but Sylvina can’t go on such short notice. “Tomorrow, early,” she tells him and kisses his mouth, slipping him her tongue so he can’t speak back.

  At home Sylvina plays with her two little girls. Theresa, who is eight, gets sullen and quiet when Sylvina pays too much attention to her two-year-old sister, Peneshish, so Sylvina is careful to chase Theresa more through the house, pretend not to see her crouching behind the coats in the closet when they play hide-and-seek. Both girls are happy for this surprise attention their mother gives them. Peneshish laughs and runs clumsily through the house, not grasping the game, just its essence.

  Peneshish is Cree for “bird,” a name Sylvina and her husband decided on one evening shortly after their daughter’s birth. They both liked the idea very much of giving her something from the past, of grounding her in a better time. Sylvina married her husband too young. By the time she was eighteen she realized the immensity of her mistake. She didn’t even love him. Years went by, were swallowed up by aimlessness. Her late teens and early twenties, gone. What everyone else claimed were the best years of their lives, Sylvina spent with him. So she got pregnant, had Theresa, figured the child would make up for some of it. Then cocaine came to the reserve. At least, the first coke Sylvina had ever seen. And that helped things for a while, especially since her husband became such a wiz when it came to getting the stuff way up here. They had both been doing a lot of it when Sylvina got pregnant the second time, cocaine cut so many times that her nose would run blood. When the doctor warned Sylvina that her baby would die or be born brain-damaged, she managed to quit it all by the end of the first trimester. Her man couldn’t. Instead he began doing her share too. Peneshish came out fine, but small. Still, Sylvina worries all the time now because Peneshish won’t talk, or can’t. Sylvina’s mother has taken to calling her Ak
akaketoot Peneshish, Quiet Bird. Sylvina often wonders if her daughter’s still tongue is due to the drugs ingested through her cord or if her name beckons old spirits who tell her there’s no rush in speaking too soon.

  Sylvina makes the children moose-meat shepherd’s pie and buys a chocolate cake from the Northern Store. The meal is her husband’s favourite, but he doesn’t show. Out drinking or working a deal. It’s just as well. If he does make it home tonight, he’ll be too far gone to try and fuck her. Sylvina doesn’t want him inside her. She wants to start things fresh with the pilot. When the girls are in bed, she calls her mother and arranges for her to pick them up from school.

  “Why can’t you?” her mother asks.

  “I can’t,” Sylvina says.

  “Why not?” her mother asks.

  “I just can’t,” Sylvina says.

  The pilot flies her south, following the river. Up here is dazzling blue. Sylvina can see the curve of the world. The sky is so bright that she puts sunglasses on. The land below is brown and frozen to a rock’s hardness. Still no snow. It has become too cold to snow. Sylvina looks down at the river. It looks like a black road, she thinks. Frozen solid. Half a metre thick already. She can see wide pressure cracks running along its surface. The ice makes her think of her daughters, of taking them skating on the bumpy river, skating and skating for kilometres.

  It’s no good to think of them, so Sylvina takes her mind away by flirting with the pilot, squeezing his thigh so his knee jumps, running her hand up the inside of his leg to settle him.She leans over and sucks on his earlobe. He acts like it’s too much of a disturbance, but she can see by the way he shifts his weight that he’s uncomfortably excited.

  “Didn’t you say once that this plane could practically fly itself?” she asks, kneeling in the little space between her seat and his.

  “Sylvina,” he says as she rubs him through his jeans, replacing her hand with her mouth, blowing a rush of hot air through the blue denim. He grips the U of the plane’s steering tighter as she unzips and releases him. She takes him into her mouth as they fly over the dams. He moans the dam’s presence to her like a faint-hearted tour guide. He cries out somewhere up from South Porcupine and they begin the quick descent to the airfield. Sylvina wants to think of it as a new beginning, but can’t.