Bone Dance

by Martha Brooks

  She and Serena and Peter Shingoose went to a party at Andrea Larkin’s. Peter drank a lot of tequila, and then she and Serena spent the rest of the night sitting with him in the bathroom. At one point he slid down into Serena’s lap and told her, “You’re a goddess. And I’m a sad Adonis. I think I love you.” Serena laughed, hugged him close.

  He didn’t show up at school on Monday, and Serena wanted to go over to his house “to see if he’s okay.” Tuesday, he showed up with a rose for Serena. Wednesday, she and Serena had another huge fight.

  The first time she ever noticed Peter Shingoose he was hoop dancing at a powwow at the Convention Centre. She’d hauled Serena along. It was three weeks after their patch-up over the pen incident, and Serena was still in a mood of atonement. The floors pounded. The drumbeats came right up through her feet to her heart and made her cry. She felt like a fool, but she couldn’t stop the tears. They flowed nonstop. Serena, dry-eyed, was astonished by all the color and the rhythm, and then all at once she said, pointing, “That guy is in my drama class.”

  There was Peter out on the floor in full costume, all feathers and hoops. He danced like a gorgeous bird. Alex’s palms began to sweat.

  He came up to them later, flashing a bone white smile at Serena. Alex couldn’t breathe, her heart was pounding so. He won’t notice me, she thought at that very moment. He’ll only notice Serena because she’s so beautiful. Serena always has boyfriends. She doesn’t give a damn if she’s tall and big and powerful. She just looks them in the eye, and they fall like bricks.

  “You have to act more confident,” Serena had told her back in the ninth grade. “When you’re made the way we are, it’s the only way you’re ever going to be popular.” This remark was coming from the same person who had pretended to paint them both with invisible paint when they were five, so they wouldn’t be noticed on their first day of school.

  Well, Serena can have him, she then thought, looking at a point past Peter’s ear so she wouldn’t have to look directly at him again. He’s too good-looking anyway. He’s probably just a big snob.

  But, as it turned out, he wasn’t. And for the past six months they had been a constant threesome.

  It wasn’t that Alex never had sort-of boyfriends. You hung out. They kissed you, stuck their tongues in your mouth, grabbed you, played stupid mind games, power games, wanted you to come home with them when their parents weren’t there. It was all very boring. And they knew Alex was bored, and it scared them. She wasn’t small, and she didn’t want to stand around under somebody’s arm and be popular. Maybe there was something wrong with her. They never moved her. Nobody moved her until Peter. She would write his name in the pattern of a heart and draw an arrow through it. She would think about him as she lay in bed at night, a slow fire creeping up between her legs, into her belly. She wanted him to touch her here. And here. And here. She could never let on to anybody, especially Serena, how he made her feel.

  Serena and Peter walked together in the halls at school, and Serena’s eyes were shiny with light, and Peter drew her close every time someone was looking.

  “You don’t even like her,” Alex said to Peter a week after this had been going on. Heavyhearted, as weighted as a mountain to the earth, she added, “You’re just playing a big pretend game.”

  “I like her,” said Peter, a big-eyed liar.

  “She’s not your type.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, shook his hair out of his eyes, stared hard at her, angry, proud, eyes glittering. “Since when do you get to tell me who I can go out with?”

  Peter left notes for Serena on her locker. Meet me later. Love you madly. Then he wouldn’t show up. Andrea Larkin told Alex, “Peter says you and Serena had a terrible fight. Are you okay?”

  She took refuge in sleep. Snow drifted across the cabin floor. Grandpa and some other spirit sat right there. Right in the kitchen. In yellow chairs. Grandpa slightly smaller. The other tall and thin and old, like a large and baggy raven. White hair flowing over the collar of a too-big black overcoat. Both of them as still as stone, snow resting in delicate drifts on their shoulders.

  In the waking world, Mom looked haggard and ashen. She was always upstairs in her office. She made tense phone calls. Tripped over boxes of waiting tax files. Dashed out to meet with clients. Drank too much coffee.

  One late afternoon, the sunset slanting through the window onto her computer, she sat, face practically absorbed by the screen, and Alex reached out one hand to unknot the tension at the back of her neck.

  “God, that feels good,” said Mom, dropping her head. “You’ve got healing hands, kid.”

  Then, lifting her head, she pulled Alex down in the chair beside her, with a soft “C’mere.” Arms came around her, holding her in place in a firm hug. “I want to talk to you about something. I’ve set up a trust fund for you. With the money Earl left. I didn’t want to just leave it in a bank somewhere, hardly collecting any interest.”

  Alex squirmed away. She went and sat down on the futon with the gold-colored throw. Shivering, she drew the throw around herself. She thought she might be sick.

  “Anytime I bring up the property or the money,” Mom said, pushing a tired hand through her hair, “you run away.” She turned back to her computer, squinted her eyes painfully.

  Two days later, Francine stood in the middle of the parking lot at Wal-Mart, where she had just purchased another set of towels that she didn’t need. “Alex,” she said, poking the key into the car door, “she’s worried about you. And, of course, she comes to me about it. Why do you two always pussyfoot around each other’s feelings? For goodness’ sake, your mother isn’t that fragile.”

  When Mom brought the subject up again, Alex said she was tired. “And I have a headache,” she added, watching her mother’s face crumple in disappointment.

  She turned, made her way up the stairs, and could feel her mother, below, still watching her. Then just as she reached the bedroom door, Mom called out, “You’re going to have to start making some decisions. Have you picked up your University of Manitoba application yet?”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Deadline for application is March the third.”

  “I know that, Mom. I said I’ll do it.”

  Her walking-around visions were frost laced. In biology lab she delicately dissected a frog, and all the while, dancing green northern lights crackled and whispered and invaded her nostrils with ozone.

  Standing in the middle of Harmony Drugs one slushy day, balancing a box of tampons in one hand and a bottle of hair spray in the other, she had a vision of her grandfather as a young man, dressed in caribou skins and wearing his red Tansi Lumber cap. He walked right past her and joined the old raven man, his spirit friend in the black coat, who floated down aisle four and pointed incredulously at his own image on the TV monitor.

  It was almost one o’clock. She had a class first period in the afternoon. Her legs felt leaden as she made her way toward the front. She was startled to see Peter standing at the checkout counter.

  He turned around, looked at her over his sunglasses, turned back to the flirty candy-colored cashier, handed over a few bills and some change, turned around again. This exchange was all very surreal, like a painting she once saw, in blazing southwestern colors, of a coyote driving a red convertible past lime green cactus plants. He had a balloon coming out of his mouth that said, “Hey, baby, what’s new?” The painting cost thousands of dollars.

  “Want a ride back?” he offered, leaning against the checkout counter.

  “No,” she said.

  “Sure you do. Please?”

  In his car, on their way to school, the dream catcher on his rearview mirror swayed hypnotically back and forth.

  “Can’t we at least be friends?” he said at last.

  She looked straight ahead.

  “Things are in a mess,” he said, adding softly, “I don’t know what to do about Serena. I started something I can’t handle. My life’s on
e big lie. The only time I ever feel like myself is when I’m dancing.”

  “Peter,” she whispered, turning her face away, “why don’t you just grow up?”

  In her dreams she searched beyond concrete and city noise and chalk-smelling school corridors, beyond weekends during which her arms ached from her parttime job at Cuppa Java, beyond history and English and chemistry tests, all requiring at least a B. She managed an A in two and scraped up a B in chemistry.

  She went to bed earlier and earlier. Made her room a sanctuary. Burned sage and sweetgrass on a clamshell, lit candles. She meditated from the womb of her bed, pressing past ceiling to stars, trying to find her way. And then she slept the clock around and dreamed.

  Out of the hill pokes tree branches and rocks and shiny tin cans, and her father’s shirts like fluttering flags and all of his money. His pile of possessions keeps growing. They are an eyesore. They are a blot on the landscape. Grandpa, bent over, carefully shovels them over in the earth, mounding them into the hill. He straightens up, leans on his shovel, wipes tears from his eyes. More tears keep coming. He’s watching someone who is running down the hill. And then she knows, even as she’s dreaming, that she is the one who is running away. Running and running. “Stop!” cries the raven, flying at her back. “Turn around and face the mystery.”

  Auntie Francine, the family tea-leaf reader, unwittingly came the closest to guessing about her dreams and waking visions one Sunday evening.

  She stared into Alex’s porcelain cup, cradled like a half-moon between her hands. “I see a disconnection,” she said, studying the pattern in the leaves, “between your head and your body.”

  “Where? I don’t see it,” said Alex.

  “Right there.” Francine’s thin finger pointed.

  Alex peered at something that, to her, resembled a crow flying off a leafy tree in search of something. Then she thought, No, it’s not a crow. It’s a raven. It’s a big raven. It’s a raven transformed. From something. Changing shape. Shape from an old man. Old Raven Man.

  “Your dreams,” Francine primly advised, looking up, “are trying to tell you something.”

  Alex’s heart caught in her throat. She hadn’t mentioned a thing to anybody about her dreams. And now she felt her whole body flush hotly. “I don’t know,” she said carefully, “what you are talking about.”

  “Why haven’t you been out to see Earl McKay’s property yet? Don’t look at me that way. The cat’s been out of the bag for quite some time. You’ll find land,” her aunt persisted. “And, apparently, a cabin.” Reaching across the table, she took a firm grip on Alex’s hand. “Listen. Those little letters you’ve been holding on to for so long aren’t him. But what he’s left you is something real and solid. That’s the important thing. Aren’t you even a bit excited over this? Little bug?”

  Francine hadn’t called her little bug for years. The sound of it, popping up like an old and long-lost friend, made her sit there wanting to stay proud while tears poured down her cheeks.

  “You’re a normal girl,” Francine added softly. “You should be happy about such a gift.”

  “Why…?” Alex wiped her tears away. More kept coming.

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “Didn’t he leave anything… to her? She’s the one who took care of me. Paid all the bills. Did whatever she had to. And I know Grandpa helped a lot. So did you. But she was the one.…”

  Now she was bawling. She wanted to stop. She couldn’t.

  Francine pulled up her chair and rocked Alex in her arms. “She’s very happy for you,” she said carefully. “You know that. All her life she’s worked hard. And now she’s built up her little accounting business, and she’s happy. And she wants you to be happy, too. She wants you to live a normal life.”

  Alex pictured her intestines at this very moment. They were snarled and knotted and begging for mercy. What did Francine mean, normal? Was her father crazy? Was that why he ran off? Was she going crazy, too?

  Behind them, the kitchen faucet dripped slowly. Each drop drummed into the sink. She could hear the swelling majesty of powwow drums as her heart broke again and again.

  9

  Serena’s dad had, for the third time in the past two years, walked out on her mother. This time they all thought it was for good. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, apparently, was standing in her nightgown by the fish tank, sobbing inconsolably over their seven-year-old goldfish Fillet, who had, coincidentally, just died of dropsy.

  “We gave him antibiotics and everything, but he died anyway. It is so gross,” Serena said over the phone to Alex. “All bloated and bloody. Nobody wants to touch him.”

  This was her way of saying she was in pain. A family crisis to override any pain she had caused Alex over the past three and a half weeks.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Alex told her.

  It was the only day she had to register at the University of Manitoba. Accessing the registry system took an hour. Then it took forever to get her courses. But if you hung up the phone you were dead, so you had to stay on the line. In the end, she got most of the ones she wanted, with a couple of compromises. Three hours later she was finally able to go over to the Fitzpatricks’ and deal with the fish, which looked as if it had exploded.

  She made Serena toast and scrambled eggs with cheese and jalapeño peppers and brought it to her in her pink room, where they sat under her wonderful hanging frog.

  “This is so nice of you,” Serena said, her lower lip trembling. She picked away at the eggs, put down her fork, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed. And then, “Peter just broke up with me,” she said finally. “I’ve tried and tried with him. I don’t understand. I don’t know why he doesn’t love me.”

  10

  When Pop, with sad pouchy eyes, finally got around to telling him, four months after the fact, that Earl had left the LaFrenière homestead to his daughter, two things happened.

  One, he wanted Pop, for Pop’s sake, to try to buy back the property.

  “We could afford it,” said Lonny. “Things aren’t so bad now.”

  “Pretty soon you’re graduating from high school,” Pop said quietly, nodding his shaggy head. “It’s less than a month away. Don’t you have any plans?”

  Here it was again, guilt money, and the guilt not even intended. “I’m going to stay out a year and work,” said Lonny. “I’d rather do that. Really I would. I just don’t know what I want. Not yet. You’d be wasting your money, Pop.”

  “But the money’s there now,” said Pop with a sidelong look, his eyes veiled with sadness, “and you’re so smart.” He rubbed the back of his big wrinkled neck and added, “And what’s done is done. The land is sold. Won’t you take this opportunity?”

  “Pop,” said Lonny softly, “you can’t keep living your life for me.”

  “Who says I can’t?” Pop gave him a quick bonerattling hug.

  It was so depressing. Pop was forty-eight years old. Working in a lumber store. Living in a crappy little house on a crappy little piece of land. He has no life, Lonny thought, and he deserves so much more.

  Later, feeling off-balance and ill, he got in the truck and drove off in the dust over to Robert Lang’s place. It was a night of long twilight at the end of May. The two of them wheeled through the blue shadows into town and got a twelve-pack of beer and a Jack Daniel’s and a large bottle of cola. They parked by the lake, near the old dance pavilion, and proceeded, quietly, to get very drunk.

  By around two in the morning, the moon hung over the water, and the sky was draped with the darkest blue. Robert slid down beside the truck, his knees poking up in the air, his hand fanning away a swarm of fish flies. “I got this memory that’s been doggin’ my ass ever since we were little kids,” he said. “Remember that time, Lon, when you and me dug up that old mound?”

  “Yes,” said Lonny.

  “Found those bones,” Robert went on. “Damn, that was scary. You ever think about that?”

  “Yes.”

 
; Robert nodded his head drunkenly and poured some more Jack Daniel’s into their cola bottle. “Wondered about that, with your Native ancestry and all. Been giving it some serious thought lately. Me and Charlene had a big long talk about your ancestry. And other stuff.”

  “You. And Charlene.”

  “Yep,” he said, pointing up at the Milky Way. “She’s into some very interesting stuff. She claims that those buggers up there see everything we do.”

  “What buggers?”

  “The stars in the cosmos and shit. Look at them, man. They’re cooold.” He took a swig from the plastic soda bottle.

  Lonny took the bottle from Robert. “Know who owns the LaFrenière land now? Earl’s daughter. City girl. Lives in Winnipeg.” He let the cola and Jack Daniel’s slide and sting down his throat.

  “His daughter.” Robert nodded his head in a stunned way. And then, for quite a while, they listened to the lake slap and sigh along the shore. “So,” he said quietly, “she’s the one who’s going to end up with the land that was supposed to be yours.”

  “Who cares,” said Lonny grimly.

  But that was a lie. The stars knew he was lying. They shone down colder than ever. And beside Robert, his best friend ever since childhood, he felt the loneliness of that lie.

  By morning they’d moved down to the lake shore and were sprawled asleep on old blankets in the sand. Robert, who was the first to stir, shivered in the misty early morning chill and poked at Lonny.

  “A raven took my T-shirt,” said Robert.

  “Bull!” Lonny sat up, giggling. He pulled on his cowboy boots and then tried to stand. He was still a little drunk.

  “I’m not kidding.” Robert grinned, looking at him with red puffy eyes. “Great big old raven stole my shirt. He was watching me, I swear. And then I catch him out of the corner of my eye. He’s picking it up in his beak. And he flaps off with it. Bugger.”