I nodded. “You’re on a lot of committees.”
He nodded. “Mm hm. I’m also the fire chief…” He pointed to the walkie-talkie. “And
I’m the coroner.”
The spruce and pine smelled sweet. I loved this watch. I loved the tight fit of the band.
And there it was: PWS High. It still had a red brick front and there were a few portables around it to the left. This would be the year I’d finally get to see inside them. “Four hundred kids grade seven through twelve go here. Your graduating class will be around thirty or forty. They say a school is the heart of the community. We already have a new principal for this year. A woman. Believe you me: that was no mistake.”
I looked at him. “Were you on the hiring committee?”
“I was,” he nodded. Across the street was the swimming pool. I loved that place. I was good at swimming. Underwater, nobody could see my face.
“Holy cow,” he said again. “Bear, do you know what I just realized?”
“What?”
He looked at his hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”
“What is it?”
He turned his truck off and ran his fingers through his hair and then touched his cheeks before he looked at me. “I know why you’re here.”
I looked at him. I could smell the cookies in the Tupperware. I saw a small picture of him and his family tucked in the dashboard. Gerald had normal hair back then.
“Holy fuckin’ moley, it’s all clear to me. How could I have missed this?”
“What?”
“Do you know about the dojo?”
“What?”
“Do you know that Rob used to be a sensei?”
I thought of Rob and his limp. “A sensei for what?”
“I don’t know. Jujitsu or karate. Batman stuff. I hear they punch rocks.”
I looked at him. “Wow.”
He nodded. “He tried last year to tame Torchy and Sfen. We advised him against it but he went ahead anyway. How do I know this, you ask? I’m on the school board. He thought he could turn those two, but they turned on him once they got what they wanted. Not only did they shatter his knee for him, they stole a sword from him.”
“Sword… what kind of sword?”
“Nephew,” he started jumping up and down in his seat. He was like a little kid. “I come from a family of prophets. No lie. I can’t believe I didn’t see this before.” He looked at me and beamed. “Oh man, oh man, oh man.” He looked left and right like he just couldn’t keep it to himself. “My boy, you are part of bigger plan. Never you mind the principal.”
I shook my head. “But he’s going to get away!” I said.
“Let’s hit the pause button on that for now. But here’s the deal: a long time ago, the museum board inherited a full suit of samurai armour and a real samurai sword. How do I know this? I’m on the board. Our museum inherited a real samurai sword and a samurai suit of armour by accident. It was a clerical error. We’ve been trying to return that armour and sword to Japan for years. Rob was the director of the museum a few years ago and kept the sword in his dojo. He was working on it, tracing the family history. It turns out it is an Emperor’s sword, a sacred sword, but for some cheap reason, the Japanese government never got back to him. We don’t know why, but the night Torchy and Sfen double-banked Rob, they destroyed his knee and stole that sword from him.”
“How?” I asked. “Why?” But then I thought of something: “Duke,” I said out loud. “I bet you any money that Torchy and Sfen poisoned Duke before they tore into Rob.”
“What?” he asked.
“Duke,” I said clearly. “Rob and Sue’s dog is sick. I bet he was poisoned by Torchy and Sfen.”
“Why would you think that?” he asked.
“I’d do it,” I said. “If I knew I had to take out my sensei and he had a guard dog, it would be necessary.”
“Holy shit,” he said. “You’re right.”
I thought of my grandmother’s medicine. To cure a dog who’s been poisoned, you need sulfur and frozen meat.
I had an idea. “Do you have any sulfur?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“I need it to help Rob.”
“You know what’s crazy,” he smiled. “I have some in the back. We were just harvesting some for the science camp. Take as much as you need.”
I would help Rob by healing Duke.
“See?” he said. “It’s all making sense. You’re Dogrib. Those brothers are Dogrib. You’re with Rob and Sue now. You’re here to return the sword to Rob because he’s always dreamt of returning the armour and the sword to Japan. That was his dream from the beginning.” He turned to me. “Bear, I swear to you now as a man who has predicted things before, you are here to return the sword to Rob. He needs that sword. Torchy and Sfen are fighters. They’re wicked. But you can do it. Get that frickin’ sword back.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “You’re on a path. I can see it. Hell, I can smell it. You go to Rob. Learn the story but play Dumb Indian. Remember the rule in Simmer: even if you already know it, pretend you don’t. Play Dumb Indian so you can learn even more of what you already know. Learn what happened in that fight. Do what you need to do to get that sword and that armour back to Japan, back to where Citizen watches are made. Man, don’t you see? These watches, that sword—it’s all a sign. You’re no frickin’ ninja. You’re a hero in waiting. Hot damn, I’m good!”
He slapped his hands together and started shuffling in his seat and he started dog paddling the roof. “Okay, okay. Cool down. I gotta go to the Walk for the Cure. I’ll drive you home.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll walk. The residence is just over there, hey?” I pointed past the school.
“You’re Indian,” he said. “Point with your lips, you.”
I got shy. My lips were ugly.
“Come on,” he said.
I frowned.
“Don’t give me your poopy lip.”
I looked at him. “My what?”
“Here in this town, we raise our kids tough. When a kid’s hurt, you know how their little bottom lip sticks out?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, our job is to go and say, “Oh. What’s that? A little poopy lip? A bird’s going to land on your lip and poop on it. This way, Indians from here don’t cry. Don’t you know that?”
I shook my head and started laughing. “That’s crazy.”
“What’s crazy is an Indian pointing with his cheap fingers. Now come on. Show me what you got. Where’s your new home?”
I looked past the school and felt stupid but I did it. I pointed with my lip to the residence.
Gerald’s dad pushed me. “Right on the money, nephew. You got it. A natural. Hot damn, this is a great night. Okay, walk and have fun. We’re in the book. Come by anytime. Your family knife is safe with me. I shall return it with your Campanola on the night you and my son graduate, okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
As he drove, Stanley pointed with his lips to a house that was burned down. “Torchy and Sfen.” He drove a little further and pointed to a duplex. One of the sides was totally obliterated by fire and smoke damage. “Torchy and Sfen.”
“What?”
“They torched over thirty houses in one night starting with the principal’s.” He shook his head. “That was the longest night of my life.” He let out his breath. “Fuckin’ fire bugs.”
“Wait,” I said as we passed another carcass of a house. “They burned down all these houses?”
He nodded. “Funny thing, though. Each one is where the sexual molestation of a child took place.”
I studied him. He was thinking something big and quiet. “So are they in jail?”
He sighed. “They’re on the run.”
Ninja
s, I thought. “And you want me to go after these guys for a sword?”
“Sure,” he said. “Like I said: you’re Dogrib. They’re Dogrib. Work something out.” He looked at his father’s watch on my wrist. “I’m worried about Rob. Do what you need to do to get that sword from Torchy and Sfen.”
I had no idea how the heck I was going to do this, but I felt something. They’d taken ratroot from me that night we met. They were astonished by it. They respected its power. I could get more…
“What?” he asked. “My nephew isn’t happy.”
I looked at him. “The principal’s going to get away. He’s going to do it again. If I’m your nephew, Wendy is your niece. She needed seventeen stitches. Four nurses had to hold her down because she didn’t understand what was happening.” I started to cry. “And she was working on her words. What are the words for what happened?” Tears stated to cloud my eyes. “You’re the coroner and on the board of of everything in this town, and you’re going to let him walk? I’m sixteen. Do something!”
He thought about it. He was quiet for a long time.
“I didn’t know about the stitches.”
I wiped my tears away but even more were coming. “Don’t you know everything?”
He let out a long breath. “I guess not.”
He looked off. “There’s one thing I’ve learned and I get the sense you should know this—and here’s another reason you can’t attack the principal.”
“What?” I asked.
“The principal,” he said, “had a partner.”
“Who?”
“Someone in town. The cops have tried to catch him but he keeps vanishing. They’ve never seen anything like this.”
I felt cold again. “So you’re telling me that the principal had help, that maybe my cousin wasn’t molested alone?”
He closed his eyes tightly and shivered. “Yes,” he said. “The principal’s wife has come forward and said he had a partner. Nobody but the cops and I know this.”
I felt so cold, like someone had iced my soul.
“I’m sorry, Bear, but I promise you this. We will find whoever this is and we will punish them both. You dig?”
I nodded.
“This town used to be so perfect,” he said as he gripped the wheel. “We used to visit, used to share. Now we have the hardest drugs and the same suffering they have down south.”
I watched him. I could tell he wanted to say something. A secret maybe.
“Okay,” he turned his truck back on. “Let’s go for a ride.” He put his truck in gear and we drove past the Elders’ Home and the drugstore and the church. We then made our way to a large abandoned hospital. Part of it had sunk. Like a whole wing of the building. This hospital looked bigger than the new one.
“I’m going to let you in on something,” he said and turned off his truck. “But you are not to tell anyone.”
I looked at him and wiped my eyes. I hated myself for crying.
He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. “The first time I saw you standing in our driveway, I had this thought: ‘That boy has so many tears inside of him.’ And I hoped when I came into the house that I could take them away. Tonight, I think I can.”
He thought before he spoke. “I spoke to a man once. He’d killed someone. He told me, ‘Once you kill a man, you will never have a full night’s sleep again. You’ll live the rest of your life like a ghost.’”
My blood turned to slush. The way he spoke about my grandfather’s knife not being a killing knife…
“Do you want to live like that?”
I shook my head. I suddenly wanted to go home.
“I am going to tell you a secret about this town. Every full moon when the men gather on the other side of this old hospital, we have a game called Furnace, though some call it The Running Man. What we do is we all draw from a deck of cards. Whoever gets the lowest card has an hour to run and hide in the hospital. Everybody pays to play this game. Even the runner. If they can hide for an hour or evade capture, they get the pot. If they can’t, well, there’s ten—sometimes twenty men with axe handles who are itchin’ to find him.”
I looked at the building. Was he lying?
“Tonight—oh in about twenty minutes, twenty or so men will be waiting to play under this almost-August full moon. Except tonight it’s a Hunter’s Moon. That means that tonight we already know who we’re hunting.” He looked directly at me. “We’re hunting the principal.”
“No…” I said.
He nodded. “Oh yes. I already know he’s going to get off, and I won’t stand for it. This is our town. I did not know about the stitches.” He got very quiet. “So, my question to you is do you want to watch?”
He looked straight at me again, and I could not look him in the eye. I looked down. “Say the word and I’ll show you how it’s done. Or, I could drop you off at the residence and you could begin your school year and become my Tall Son. I would adopt you and you could become Gerald’s best friend. This could be the greatest year of your life. You will learn to hunt moose, caribou, ducks. I could teach you how every moose carries a Bible. I could show you how the Dogribs honour our ancestors for Night of the Spirits. We could look in the bowls the next morning and maybe we’ll see caribou hair to show us that great hunting is ahead for all of us. I’d love to come out to the fish camps the program goes out to year after year and see you and my son making dry fish together. Get that sword and suit of armour back to Japan. You’re here for so many reasons and you’re not alone anymore.”
He looked at me again. “This could be your life. I promise you this could be a life with so much love on the way to you, or you could walk out—I would walk with you—and I would show you the women standing with their men, praying, as the men stretch, as the men ready themselves to hunt.”
I looked at the moon and swallowed. My mouth was so dry. “What about Wendy?”
He nodded and handed me a water bottle from under his seat. I unscrewed the top and drank. It was delicious, freezing.
“Let me take care of her. I have a friend who owes me a favor at the Health Centre in Rae. She would take Wendy under her wing until you return for Christmas, spring break and when your grade twelve is finished.”
I wanted to cry with relief. As long as she was okay. As long as she had someone. We were all we had left for family, but now I was being offered more.
“Wear my father’s watch. When you harvest your first moose or caribou, I will give you your grandfather’s knife back. Let that blade sing as we make dry meat together. I will show you how. I’ll teach you everything I know for as long as I have you.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“You are me forty years ago. I was angry, too. But I had a man I loved very much tell me that we always have to remember that there is man’s way, there is God’s way, and there is the Indian Way. And that set me free of so many things that could have ended the life that I deserved.”
“So this game, this ‘Running Man.’ What way is that for him?”
He nodded and looked to the hospital. “Maybe all ways.”
I drank again. I had asked a question I already knew the answer to. I felt free. I felt so excited for school to begin and for all the other students from across the Territories to come. I would help Rob. He would train me to fight. I would help him get the holy blade back from Torchy and Sfen. I swore it. I would get my grade twelve and I would learn all I could from Gerald’s dad and his family. What would it be like to hunt caribou with kids my age? What would it be like to bring Wendy dryfish I’d made with my own hands?
“So,” he said. “You get to choose: walk with me and see what’s about to happen or go home and start over.”
I nodded. All I wanted to do was go home, back to my room. All I really wanted to do was sleep. “Let’s go.”
This man who I suddenly fell in love with reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small pile of sewing beads. He put them in his other palm and showed them to me. “See these? I keep finding them all over our house. You know what they’re for?”
I shook my head.
“My beautiful, gorgeous wife—who only gets sexier with time—is showing my son’s girlfriend how to sew moccasins.”
He poured them into my hand.
“That’s my wish for you, my Tall Son. May the woman of your dreams teach the woman of your son’s dreams how to make moccasins for him when he graduates from grade twelve.”
He looked to my feet. “What’s your size?”
I shrugged.
He smiled and started his truck. “You’ll come for supper when things settle down, okay? We’ll trace your feet out on some paper and get you a pair of moccasins for when you and your brother cross that stage together, okay?”
I nodded and closed my hand carefully around those beads. “Okay.” I then put my hand on his. “Mahsi cho. Can I have that sulfur?”
“You may,” he said.
I went to Duke who was lying down in the grass in his pen. He was so weak, he was panting.
“Duke,” I said. “I’m a friend. You’ve been poisoned and I’m here to help you.”
With what little life he had left, he started to whimper and growl.
I’d need meat. Caribou. To waken the wolf in him.
“What are you doing?” Rob asked. I never heard him coming, but I expected that.
Night Moves Page 9