by Rudy Wiebe
Last call had been made as the lights flicked off and on and he wanted to impress Mom, so he yelled out his order with all the rest. I don’t think he’d ever ordered in his life, he was a living mooch, he lived mostly at the Sally Ann, and the waiters thought him a joke and didn’t listen. Calvin had a head like a rock, and when a short waiter passed with an empty tray, to attract his attention he head-butted him and laid him out. When the waiter got up off the floor, he banged Calvin with a butt of his own to the forehead. Calvin scrambled up, grabbed the waiter’s hair with both hands, and smashed him dead centre. So the fight was on, Indians against the world, one entire side of the bar was breaking up. I tried to keep guys off Mom, but she was already fighting. Then the bartender cut the lights. In the dark there was screaming, tables and chairs crashing; when the lights came back on, the waiters and bouncers were yelling at everyone to leave, outa here, it’s over! I was heading for the front door fast when the nasty short waiter shoved the firedoor open and threw me out across the alley against the brick wall. And there were the cops with nightsticks—they called them “Indian licorice sticks”—rushing us.
They slammed me over the trunk of a cop car with my arm twisted behind my back, and then more cars arrived fast as the Indians shot out of the door, and they clubbed them into a heap on the pavement—Winnipeg cops seemed to love caving in Indian heads, and I was just lucky being thrown out first—finally they threw me into the cruiser. Then Mom came out and I watched them beat my mother.
Her knees never buckled. She had two cops literally hanging on her arms, clubbing her with nightsticks. I tried to kick out the window to help her—my sad life with break-proof glass!—I was scared to death for her. They were breaking her arms back, pounding her head. She was clubbed on the forehead, and her face squashed down onto the trunk, but she twisted around and yelled, “Vonnie! Stay in the car!” when they got her cuffed, but the door was locked, I couldn’t get out anyway, and a special car drove up just for her, and they stuffed a lot of people, most of them bleeding, into the back with me. They pulled us out inside the basement of the Remand Centre on Princess Street, I guess there were too many for the cop-shop cells, and there I saw them hauling Mom handcuffed into an elevator.
She shouted at me, “Just shut up, do as they say,” before the doors slammed on her. They threw me out of the other elevator onto the main floor, the front entrance. There was nothing there but a few chairs and two memorial wreaths leaning against the wall, me in my white outfit covered with mud and blood, my graduation night into the happy, carefree world of skid row.
I was worried. One wreath had a purple sash with golden words: “Winnipeg City Police, the Finest Force,” so I stole that as a token and searched around till I found the receptionist at the front desk. She didn’t know where Mom was, or why I was there. She sent me up in the elevator and it stopped inside a huge steel cage with a cop glaring at me. I asked him about Mom, if she was all right; and maybe she had made a deal with them to leave me alone because he looked royally pissed off at me. My mother was cooling out in the drunk tank and if I didn’t get the hell out I’d be in there with her. So I went home, walking down Main Street alone and embarrassed at my dirty clothing. One thing I knew: my drinking career was launched.
Next day Mom came home all black and blue. By evening the house was full, everyone talking about their war wounds, especially Calvin, who somehow moved in then, and all the White pigs they’d wiped out the night before. I figured with that many of the “Finest Force” lying on the streets, not a cruiser could have moved in Winnipeg all weekend.
An odd knock came at our door in the worst cold of the winter. I answered and saw a gigantic pile of coats, scarves, and jackets, heard a faint voice I recognized. I lifted the hood of a jacket—it was Minnie, her face so frozen she could not speak. I got her inside onto the couch, turned up the heat, and tried to help her undress: the scarf over her mouth was solid ice, the fringes snapped off when I unwrapped it. She screamed in pain as she started to thaw, but I ran a warm tub and helped her into it. I could hear her soft cries coming through the door. She had been drunk hitchhiking, got raped and left naked, but she got herself dressed again and walked almost thirty miles from Portage la Prairie. She told me the bare details once. She never spoke of it again.
Sometimes I can’t believe what women have to survive.
When I was in Winnipeg a few years before, in Bell School—barely fourteen and not learning much, mostly playing hookey in the washroom—Mom lived with a man called Wes, and they, with Kathy and Perry and me, moved to Leaf Rapids, where Mom was hired to drive a pit truck in the new strip mine. Leaf Rapids, Manitoba: so far north and so new it wasn’t on any map, so cold the snow was hard as the rock for seven months every year. They were bulldozing mines out of the spruce and muskeg and rock, and that’s where I fell in love and lost what I thought I still had, but didn’t.
My virginity. I had lived with certain parts of my consciousness shut down so completely, refusing to remember for so long, that I actually believed then in the deepest awareness of my mind that I had never been penetrated. I had not even masturbated. Mom always told me my crotch was a bad place; when you bathe never, ever, look between your legs or feel there, wash quick and leave it alone. You hide your body from everyone, including yourself. Especially men, and in particular the men in your own family. I knew I had grown hair there, that my body was changing, but for a hundred reasons I avoided it. In Leaf Rapids I fell in love with a Native boy named Nelson and we hiked to a trapper’s cabin we knew. We were alone and I was so happy kissing him, I was completely, romantically in love, and this would be it. O, I was so in love with this marvellous boy, he could dance better than Elvis! And then I scared him witless when I started to scream, “My feet, my feet!”
I screamed so loud my own ears rang and I could not stop. It was my legs cramping back, my feet bent outwards rigid as rocks. I tried to get up, to stand, and my feet and legs twisted tighter, harder. I fell down on the floor still screaming. He jumped up and ran out, but after a while he came back and tried to help me. I was groaning, rolling in pain, my legs and feet splayed out stiff as if they were bent iron, but when he touched them it was even worse. He tried his best to calm me, poor boy, but he and I never got to try again and find out about possibly good sex because he was long gone. I couldn’t understand why his touching me like that twisted my body into an excruciating contortion. It just terrified me more about sex. My mom must be right: the fire of hell lived between my legs; just leave it alone and keep everybody away. At some point in spring we moved back to Winnipeg, on Selkirk west of Main, and from there I was shipped back to Butte again. For more operations on my lip, and Dad living alone, waiting for me.
Minnie was tough beyond belief. The same evening that she arrived in Winnipeg frozen, she asked me how much cash I had. One dollar. She said, good, that’s entrance fee, get yourself fixed up, it’s time for you to live and learn. She was older. I still thought she knew what she was doing, and off we went to the Manor Hotel. Beer cost ninety-nine cents a bottle; she ordered one, poured half into the glass for me, and swallowed twice from the bottle. Then she left me alone at the table—I didn’t know it but I was being used as young meat set out to attract attention—and in a few minutes she was back with guys who kept us supplied till closing time. She drank and I covered her back, got her home safe. I learned to drink beer, and settled in with her showing me how to start every night. We came to be called the Gruesome Twosome, and for good reason.
In the next months we were eighty-sixed out of every bar on the skid; only the toughest, the Occidental Hotel on North Main, would have us, and that became my home bar, my daily place, my hell on earth. No one knew or asked our real names, or where we lived; she was “Four-foot-fuck-all” and I was “Long Streaks of Misery.” It suited me, I was grim-faced, quiet, deadly when I had to be. I could fight alone like a man and never spoke unless spoken to, and then only a word or two. I never smiled, only a bit when I danced
. Serious, don’t cross me or I’ll fight to the finish. Minnie never called me Vonnie; she’d yell across the crammed Occidental bar, “Hey, Streaks!” and everybody’d look over at me and laugh. That was the time in the seventies when the streaking craze of running naked through a crowd was slowly fading, but I was all dressed and never cracked a smile, I’d just go to her.
I learned how to handle myself. I never travelled in a pack like most street women who can’t fight; they gang-pile their enemies. I thought them gutless. I could always count on Minnie to stand with me if she was around and sober enough, though basically she had the attitude “So you couldn’t handle it and you got fucked, well, you’ll get fucked again, forget it,” and I learned to take care of my own back.
Minnie tried to stand with me, but she really didn’t care: she accepted abuse—it’s the price you pay, forget it, c’mon, let’s party—she never had the reaction, like I always did, to fight back until either you win or you’re beaten down to the ground. By age nineteen, Minnie had already resigned herself to take whatever kind of violence she got battered with. However often it happened, she simply refused to think about it.
But if you refuse to take the shit the world dumps on you—if, like me, you fight back—it’s actually safer being alone. My rules were: never drink or appear drunk on the street, never sell your ass, never hang out with horny old White guys, stand alone. Then you never have to confront anyone with “Where were you when I needed you?” That’s how vendettas start, and some day you get jumped anyway by someone you thought was your friend for something you can’t even recall from years back. Depend only on yourself was my rule, and if they crowd your space or gang-pile you and you’re going down, take as many as possible with you, maybe they won’t try it again. Both women and men tried to recruit me, but what was the point? Fight their problems too? On the street I decided I was born alone and that’s the way I’d go out: alone.
Of all the fights I won or lost or got out of, I know I’m part of the hidden, sometimes forgotten-for-a-little-while-but-never-erased sorrow of the many people I knew who, like me then, lived on Winnipeg’s Indian skid, one of the biggest aboriginal peoples’ hell-holes on earth. I never worked the street as a hooker; on welfare days there were lots of Indians splurging, showing off their temporary money. I had casual work here and there, always temporary. I went to parties for the booze, but mostly I walked the streets by myself or spent time at “party houses” where people drank night and day, steadily.
I basically lived on the streets because Mom wanted me out of her house. I was seventeen; she told me it was time for me to get out and live with someone. But I didn’t shack up; I’d go home to change, have a shower, sleep, heal from fights, whatever was necessary, but Mom really did not want me around. She always worked, and her hang-around Calvin hated me.
One summer day Calvin came in with a baseball bat and smashed it down in the centre of the table where Minnie and I sat quietly having a drink. He yelled he’d beat us both to pulp, useless bitches. Panfaced, I walked to the kitchen cupboard and took out two butcher knives. I laid one on the table in front of Minnie and sat down with the other in front of me and took another slow swallow of beer.
“If he hits me,” I told Minnie in my calmest voice, “you split his guts. If he goes for you, I will.”
That was me then at seventeen: no talk, never smile, walk alone, never look anyone in the eye to make them feel threatened. Never a word of personal talk to anyone, not Mom or Karen or Kathy or Minnie. I didn’t know or think what was the matter with me—and something was seriously the matter—but if a direct threat was made, an action required, I knew exactly what to do: lay it out clear and simple as a bat in hand and two knives on the table.
Calvin couldn’t face Minnie and me. He walked off, yelling, into the living room, came back without the bat, and grabbed one of our knives, started waving it around in the air, ranting even louder. Performance. He was all shithead actor and I lost it. I jumped him, knife and all, with a beer bottle. I beat him over the head till the bottle broke and so did he; he ran to his room, grabbed his clothes, and left. I looked out the window: he was sitting by the garbage bin without a shirt on, bloody all over, and drinking a twenty-sixer. Finally he was gone. After an hour the city police were at our door, looking for him. I said I didn’t know, but gave them the bat.
“If you see him, tell him he forgot this. He tried to use it on my sister and me.”
They took it, and left.
My shadow tactics and silence kept me out of the worst. Nevertheless, I could not avoid completely being preyed upon, violated.
For me, North Main, Winnipeg, is skinner city, full of pathetic, feeble, sexless men with their conscience destroyed. They wait till women are passed out, either from booze or drugs, and then they brutalize and rob them, and sometimes it’s done by a crowd of men daring each other on. Native men do this a lot, especially to Native women—a dreadful shame on our people, but they prey on each other’s suffering. To be taught how to suck, fuck, drink, and fight is a very hard, cruel way to live; to survive it you have to act adult before you know you’re doing it. Becoming an adult in a beer bottle is small and limiting; you never have time to grow wiser, you never know better than to try and stay where things are familiar and you can somehow handle them because you’ve already had to. You notice other people of course, especially the rich and apparently happy ones driving by in cars, walking into neat houses, but you know that can never be you. That’s already impossible.
By example I was shown how to drink and fight, but I was never taught what it meant to be a woman—except what I understood to be the shame of it. All Mom ever told me was, “Mark my words, you’ll find out! You’re asking for it and you’ll get it.” Despite all her experience of residential school, working and looking for work, drinking, marriage and giving birth, and suffering, she never explained much to me; she lived as she could until forced to plough straight ahead into whatever awaited her. She’d say, “Look at Jane; she gets drunk, she passes out and men take turns on her—so don’t get drunk!” Easy to say.
Or she’d give me her brand of comfort, “You got hurt, the damage is done. It’s not my fault. You made your bed, now lie in it; stop pitying yourself; don’t cry over spilt milk; get on with it …”—all the useless clichés of a beaten life. So I never told her anything of what happened to me; nor did she ask.
She did come with me when the police caught up with me about the Douglas Barber case in Butte. One day around New Year’s, 1979, four cops stood on the porch of our house in Winnipeg when I opened the door: two RCMP and two plain-clothes Montana State marshalls. I was alone at home, and they were so enormous they surrounded me like a wall sitting in the living room. I had broken probation in Butte, I was subpoenaed to be a witness at the Frank Shurtliffe trial. The initial charge of manslaughter in the death of Douglas Barbour had been changed to one of murder, and Yvonne was to be called as a witness for the Prosecution. So Mom took leave from her job and flew with me a whole day, through Minneapolis and Great Falls, to Helena. Dad, with Perry, drove up from Butte to meet us.
The prosecuting lawyers told me how to comb my hair and gave Mom money to buy me a dress. Mom said nothing. She took me out and bought the ugliest dress in Helena because she said anything nice was whorish. The trial was in Boulder, and there Frank sat with his lawyer, the first time I’d seen him since that nightmare night. Mom and Dad were in the gallery, side by side. I kept my head down, looked at nothing, and said what the lawyers told me: I knew nothing, it was hazy and long ago, I didn’t remember. I felt really bad for Frank, but what could I do? He and Barber were grown men fighting each other in the snow up on the mountain, why had they hauled a young girl into it? His lawyer was terrifying to me; he used words I couldn’t understand and I told him so. He finally threw his pen in the air and said, “She’s either lying or just stupid—no further questions!” and the judge let me go. I was to be escorted back to Canada.
In the motel
Dad slept on the floor, Mom and Perry on the mattress, and I on the boxspring. We were all packed up to leave when suddenly Dad was yelling at Mom that she’d stolen the top plate of his false teeth! We looked everywhere, unpacked the car, every bag—nothing—and he wondered if maybe he’d swallowed them. He began patting his stomach to see if he could feel them, and then he got a strange expression on his face and ran into the washroom: his teeth were hanging in the crotch of his underwear. So when we took off in opposite directions we were laughing.
I never personally knew what Frank was convicted of until 1993. Then, when Dad visited me in P4W, he told me the sentence was 77 years for some degree of manslaughter, but that he had now been granted parole and was out of prison. On our flight back to Canada, Mom said if Frank ended up in the same jail as Leon and something happened to him, it would be my fault. Otherwise she said nothing. When I tried to talk about it she told me to shut up, there was nothing to brag about. The last comment Mom made on the whole Barber–Shurtliffe mess was when we landed in Winnipeg. She told me:
“I’ve never been as ashamed of any of my children as I am of you.”
All I had left was street people, and I really took to skid-row.
My first pregnancy came about by rape when I was seventeen, and a pretty Native woman set me up for it. At a house on Pacific Avenue, after she invited me to a party and drugged my beer so I passed out and remembered nothing, all night with six guys. Some were her relatives, she told me. I knew something vile had happened, but not what, and it worried me. A few days later I was in the Occidental again, having a drink with a new friend—young, beautiful, and a complete skid innocent—and this same woman came over from a table where she was sitting with those same Indian men and asked if she wanted to go to a party. I said maybe, and she said, “Not you, just her.”