by Dawn Dumont
They stayed across the road from us at Uncle Frank’s. For my siblings and me, it was like we had been in a coma and now someone had brought us back to life with a shot of adrenaline straight to our hearts. From the day they arrived, Celeste, Dave and I were hanging out at Frank’s. We loved being with our cousins who had lost none of their enthusiasm for everything mischievous. We watched as they transferred a tractor motor into a truck frame in order to make the world’s first “truck-tor.”
“So are you coming to our school?” I asked.
“No, the goat is going to home school us,” Malcolm replied. “Boy, you ask a lot of dumb questions for someone who’s supposed to be smart.” Malcolm was still as charming as ever.
“What’s the school like?” Nathan asked, “Are there lots of pretty girls?”
“You’re gonna have trouble — they don’t like Natives at our school.”
Malcolm shrugged. “Where do they?”
A thrill went down my spine. My cousins weren’t scared; they were big and bold. They had faced down violent, drug-crazed gangs; the spoiled white kids would be no match for them.
Nathan was in my year and I couldn’t have been happier. Our first class together was math. I felt so proud seeing him walk in wearing his black jeans, ripped jean jacket and leather vest. I smiled at him and called his name. Every head in the class turned towards me; the other students had forgotten the sound of my voice. Now with the support of a cousin who HAD to be friendly with me, my voice was already louder and more confident.
Nathan sat behind me and tapped me on the shoulder to borrow a pen, then a piece of paper. Then he tapped me again. He handed me the piece of paper that read: “Where are all the Indians?”
I wrote, “This is all there is.” And handed it back. He read it nodding. Then he stared out the window for the rest of the class.
At lunchtime, instead of eating my lunch alone in front of my locker, I went to look for Nathan. I wanted to explain to him that it wouldn’t be so bad, that he and I could have lots of fun even if no one ever talked to us. “We can study and we can write papers together and in science class, we can even share a microscope!”
By the time I found him, he had already found his friends. The school had built a place for students like Malcolm and Nathan. Half school, half detention centre — Remedial — was the holding cell for students who could not make it anywhere else. There were a lot of Native students in Remedial.
“You guys don’t belong here,” I argued. “You both have good grades.”
“Nope. We failed our placement test,” Nathan said. He described how they had fooled around during the test period.
My self-esteem depended completely on my grades so I could not understand how someone would want others to think they were stupid. Nathan and Malcolm believed that the sacrifice was worth it; now they could hang out with the only other Native students in the school and do less homework.
I chided them for taking the easy path even as I inwardly congratulated them for finding a way out of the jail I’d been sentenced to. They rejoined their motley crew. These were students who had been sidelined early in their academic careers. All boys — they came from the poorest families on the reserve.
I recognized some of them. David had been in my class until grade four when he got stuck on math. Then there was Everett, who often switched schools three or four times a year, depending on which relative was keeping him. There was Jack — nobody knew what was wrong with him — but he had never been in regular classes. All of them had an unfit, unkempt look about them as if they had been looking after themselves since they were small children. They were the lost boys, and Malcolm and Nathan were their Peter Pan and Tinkerbell.
One of the lost boys was a white kid known as Samuel. He was mentally disabled. I don’t know how the remedial students treated him. I knew that the mainstream students treated Samuel poorly. On a bus ride to a track meet, a few of the white boys had made him sit on the floor of the bus. I wanted to speak up but making a big fuss out of terrible situation can sometimes make it worse, so I didn’t. (Also, I am a coward.)
My cousins adopted Samuel into their gang along with the other lost boys. They walked downtown together and hung out in front of the ice cream store. Malcolm and Nathan would flirt with girls and the lost boys would stand in the background and grin. Then they would wander back to the school at their leisure. After school, Malcolm and Nathan bid Samuel adieu, piled the rest of the Native boys into their truck-tor and drove everyone home. It had been two days and my cousins already had a better social life than I’d ever dreamed of.
Two new students — even Native ones — in the middle of the year did not go unnoticed by my schoolmates. The white guys noted their proud posture and their large muscles and decided to ignore them. The white girls kept looking and some went even further. Ginnie was a tall blonde in my sister’s class. In the morning biology class, she whispered to my sister that she was interested in Malcolm and by afternoon’s English class they were a couple.
“I like dating a Native guy,” she cooed to her friends as Celeste and I walked by. “He’s a bad boy.”
Celeste rolled her eyes. “I hate that. Just cuz he’s Native, she assumes he’s wild and crazy.”
It would have been insulting except that Malcolm WAS wild and crazy. If he auditioned for a high school production of Rebel Without a Cause, Malcolm would have been the first person cast. His clothing, demeanor, language and even his walk screamed bad boy. I wasn’t surprised that Ginnie was excited about him. They were a good match. Ginnie was also something of a bad girl; rumor had it that she had had intimate relations with a vegetable. It was also rumored that she had started this rumor herself.
Their romance became the talk of the school. Heads turned as they walked past. Both Malcolm and Ginnie found the interest exciting. It made me nervous. Before Malcolm and Nathan came along, Natives were disliked but generally ignored. Now, our dark skin was attracting attention.
A group of boys called out Malcolm and Nathan about a week after the relationship with Ginnie started. They told Ginnie that she had to break up with Malcolm or else they would fight him. Ginnie told the white boys, “I can see whoever I want! Nobody owns me! I may be a beautiful white woman but I am not a prize to be fought over!” The boys ignored her hysterics and told her the time and place.
Malcolm and Nathan gathered up their lost boys a few minutes before the fight. Celeste and I hovered near them.
Everything I knew about fighting I learned from watching movies. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over before you know it. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Eye of the Tiger. Kumité,” I said, as I bounced around them, my anxiety making me bouncy.
Malcolm smirked. “Has anyone ever told you how much you resemble a chipmunk?”
Just him. Many times. I covered up my cheeks defensively. “I’m worried, that’s all. I don’t want you guys to get hurt.”
Malcolm laughed. “We won’t even fight. You’ll see.”
The white guys had not expected them to show up; this was apparent in the nervous smiles that crept across their faces.
Nathan wore a confident smile that comes from knowing that you will not be beaten.
Malcolm wore the stoic expression of someone who approaches violence as though it is work. And, not hard work, more like distasteful work, like taking out the garbage. The rest of the lost boys looked bewildered. This was more attention than anyone had shown them in their lives so far.
As the lost boys fanned out behind him, Malcolm walked forward and told the group of pale guys in front of him that he was ready.
Celeste and I stood on the sidelines. Ginnie hurried over to join us. “Today, I am a Native,” she said bravely and put her arms around Celeste and me. I was grateful that she had not found a feather to wear in her hair.
The white boys began the process of backing down. A young diplomat — I think he was on the student government — stepped forward and told Malcolm that it was all a
big misunderstanding, “Nobody wants any trouble. It’s just that . . . ”
“What?” Malcolm asked.
“That you guys think you can run this school or something.” The guy said it apologetically.
“Who says we don’t?” Nathan asked. He laughed, which took the sting out of it.
A few others joined in the laughter and Malcolm allowed himself a faint smile.
It looked like the fight was unraveling until one guy — a known bully — yelled, “Samuel!”
Samuel stood in the centre of the lost boys; his height making him stand out like an oak among the willows. Slowly he turned his attention to the bully.
The bully gave him a charming smile, “Samuel, what are you doing with these guys? We’re your friends.”
Samuel was confused.
“Whose side are you on Samuel? You’re not an Indian, you’re white!” the bully yelled.
Malcolm looked at Samuel. Samuel looked at the group of white boys and he broke free of the lost boys to join them.
“They made you sit on the floor,” I wanted to remind him. “They treated you like crap.”
Malcolm turned his lost boys around and walked away.
Later that week, Mom went to her monthly school board meeting. Mom was the first person ever appointed to the school board from the reserve and she took her duties very seriously. She wanted to ensure that we had the best education possible. It also gave the inside track on the best school gossip.
That night, Mom returned later than usual. She hurried into the living room and asked Celeste and me about the near-fight between Malcolm and the white guys. We told her what we had seen.
“The school board wanted to kick Malcolm out,” Mom told us.
“He never fought anyone!” I protested.
“The fight is just an excuse. It’s because of that white girl. I set them straight,” Mom said, congratulating herself on her assertiveness as she nervously sucked on her cigarette. “I told them, this isn’t the 1950’s. No way, Jose. This is the twentieth century and he can date who-ever the hell he wants. This is what those black people were fighting for down south — you know with the bridge and the hoses and the water truck — for the dream or whatever that was — just like that I stood up to them, and told them all off — you bet your ass!”
Confrontation was as natural to Mom as a savings account and I knew we’d be hearing about this one for a few years at least. She retold her story several times, adding and refining her speech until it sounded like she had delivered Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech to the school board.
Finally the adrenaline wore off and she became calm. Then a thoughtful look crossed her face. “Doesn’t Malcolm have a girlfriend back home?”
He did. And when she found out about the white girl, Malcolm was ordered home. He left that weekend, deciding that pissed off gang-bangers were not as scary as a pissed off girlfriend.
Nathan hung on to finish the school year with the lost boys. While he lacked Malcolm’s leadership skills, he had enough charm to seduce every Aboriginal girl within fifty miles. The lost boys followed in his wake; proximity to girls is more than enough reason to follow a leader.
Fun dominated their school schedules and I watched them frolic in the parking lot from my classroom window. They teased each other and play wrestled under the spring sun. I also noticed the tall, pale lost boy playing along with them, too slow to remember that he did not belong with them or wise enough to know that it didn’t matter.
THE RESERVE VS. SATAN’S BRIDES
GROWING UP THE QUESTION, “WHAT ARE YOU going to be?” never baffled me. A movie, And Justice for All, had sealed my fate. So when the question was asked, my answer was given without a moment’s hesitation, “A lawyer, of course.” No one ever asked the follow-up question, “What does a lawyer do?”
Because if they had asked, my answer would have been revealing: “They wear pretty suits with high heels that clack smartly down the hallways of justice.”
When I went home after my first year of law school, my relatives had their legal questions ready for me. They sat across from me as I ate my cereal and laid out their legal dilemmas:
“Now let’s say I punched a cop in the face . . . no, no, hear me out . . . you haven’t heard the whole story . . . if I punched him right in the kisser after he accused me of stealing a car and everyone knows it was my brother, and not me . . . my question is: do I have a case for mistaken identity?”
“So I was coming out of the grocery store and the clerk stopped me and found three cartons of smokes . . . and this is the tricky part . . . the cartons were stuffed in my two-year- old’s backpack. Even I know that two-year-old’s can’t be prosecuted so why am I getting charged?”
“Okay, so I stole a doctor’s prescription pad and wrote myself a prescription — only so I could get some painkillers cuz my hand was killing me after punching out that cop. Isn’t that self-defense or something?”
The cases were dazzling in their complexity. I pondered each question carefully, then applied my legal knowledge to the facts, formulated my answer and delivered it. This process took about twenty seconds. Then, I would accept my payment: a look of awe.
It’s probably this appetite for approval that got me into trouble. I was at my parent’s house on summer vacation when my older sister Tabitha called one night. In clipped words she asked to speak to Mom. I knew her tone. It could mean only one thing: trouble.
I told her Mom was busy and pressed the phone closer to my ear; my toe tapped on the floor as my body eagerly responded to the drama of the situation.
“I need you and Mom to come to my reserve immediately. They are charging our baby-sister with witchcraft,” Tabitha said.
“Sorry? Did you say . . . witchcraft?”
Tabitha gave a frustrated sigh, which I took as a sign to quit being a smart ass. She explained that her husband’s reserve, the White Lake Nation had charged our youngest sister Pammy with four counts of witchcraft. (White Lake is a pseudonym to protect my family from further witchcraft-related accusations. Also, to protect the real reserve from ridicule, because accusing people of witchcraft in the twenty-first century is some crazy shit.)
The White Lake Band Council had summoned fifteen-year-old Pammy to face the charges against her. They had apparently arisen from her last visit with Tabitha a few months before.
“Wow that’s so cool. You’re going to a witch trial!” I said, enjoying her obvious annoyance. “Make sure to tell us all about it.”
“I’m not going. I have to work. You and Mom are going.”
“Sorry, I skipped the class on witchcraft law.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe or not, you have to take it seriously.” Tabitha knew she wasn’t dealing with rational types. She had accepted that when she moved onto her husband’s reserve. His community was different from ours, some might say backwards. But it was also rich, much wealthier than ours. They had money; we had science. It’s hard to say who had it better.
Unlike my sister, I was not prepared to be diplomatic. I had inherited my mom’s impatience and I dismissed people who believed in ghosts, aliens and witches with rolled eyes and a contemptuous shake of the head. I did not listen to them, question them, or worse, drive six hours out of my way to spend a day with them.
Tabitha believed that ignoring the witch hunters would make the problem worse. “If no one shows up, they can just ban our baby sister from the reserve. Forever. And then who will baby-sit for me?”
I told her that my only travel plans were a trip to the beach followed by a quick jaunt to the local Dairy Queen.
Tabitha turned on the big guns. “I thought you were training to be a lawyer or something. Don’t lawyers protect people from persecution?”
“Yeah, in a big city where people will notice.”
“Don’t you want to show people who know you — like your cousins and your ex-boyfriend — what a great lawyer you are?”
Tabitha knew whi
ch buttons to press. Of course, I only had one button, labelled, “Ego.”
The next day Mom and I drove to my sister’s reserve. We had so many questions on the way there such as, what would a witch trial look like? Why Pam? And, of course, who the hell still believes in witches?
Pam was guilty of many things but witchcraft was not one of them. If this crucible was prosecuting her for crimes against pairs of jeans, I could understand. She had a tendency to wear them so tight that their seams screamed for mercy — then again so did any Native girl under the age of forty.
If she were being prosecuted for delivering smartass remarks and being a general spoiled little shit, then that would also be more believable. Even if they had to invent a new charge for her say—“Assault against the English language,” then I would nod my head and say, “Yes, I can understand why you created a law in order to punish my sister for saying things like, ‘un-fucking-butt-ass believable.’”
As the baby of the family, Pammy was a little wild. The last five years had more than proven that to all of us. When she was a baby, we would stand over her bassinet and imagine her future. Would she be a lawyer? A doctor? A teacher?
“I want to be a stripper,” she baldly declared these days to anyone who listened. “Cuz they get to wear cool clothes and have fake tits.”
Where we once cheered every time she spoke, now we listened to her stories in open-mouthed horror. The same parents, who used to scream at us for being irresponsible and whiny, now hugged us close whenever we visited. “You’re great kids. We didn’t know. We swear, we didn’t know.”
We watched her apply makeup thick enough to protect her against radiation poisoning and squeeze into tops that fit her when she was two. Then when Pammy was sixteen, she got a tattoo of a rose wrapped in barbed wire on her breast. “Like it? My friends say it’s the sexiest fuckin’ thing ever.”