Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  I caught up with him and we made our way back in the peppery light of the moon. The willows were shaking in the breeze, the waves now a distant world away. Tias’s back was glowing from dead stars, dead light. His parents were wicked mad and sent us both to bed without any supper, called us both a “goddamn curse” for making them worry. We giggled in the tent and made shadow animals with a flashlight. His was a wolf, mine an eagle.

  I never had to tell him, that was how I knew I loved him—I never had to tell him.

  VII

  After I had finished and cleaned myself up, I transferred the money to my bank account, typed back, “Talk soon, HH,” and signed off. I lay back in my bed and traced the imprint of Tias’s body with my finger. It still smelled of him, like the citrus-olive oil blend of his pomade and the robust smell of his Axe body spray, Phoenix I think he said, the blue can. It’s pretty expensive, you know, especially for him, a boy still living with his rents who are, themselves, living off child-tax credits and food banks. You can get a can of Axe for a toonie though, if you ask old Peggy to pick you up a can. See, Peggy is our best NDN smuggler, she’ll take a list of items you want from any department store—Wal-Mart is her favourite target—steal those items, and sell them to you for a hardcore discounted price. It benefits everyone. Momma always said that woman was the epitome of resource, that she saved up enough from pulling over to the side of the road to collect cans from ditches, got extra cash from coupon savings, and hoarded one-litre Pepsi’s when they were on sale to sell at the bingo halls—said she saved up enough cash over a few years to buy her own momma a new washer and dryer. Before Uber was a thing, Peggy offered rides to people for a few bucks and if you needed a lift down to the hospital or if an Elder needed to head into town, she’d give you a ride for free so long as you threw her a few smokes and a slab or two of bannock. Momma says she’s sort of the folk hero of the rez, everyone has mad respect for her. Though, these days Peggy hasn’t been able to hold herself down since she got a criminal record for assaulting the social worker that scooped up her babies and now she mostly flip-flops between Winnipeg and the rez—and it works for us Nate boys who want to smell fancy for cheap. Of course, we all use each other to haggle with our own troubles—she’ll save up enough for a couple king cans of Bud and pass out down Portage and us, well, we use our skills to hustle and make a few bucks. It’s an endless loop. I guess that’s the NDN bartering system?

  And I should correct myself here, Tias isn’t a hustler like me, no, he is a different kind of hustler, maybe more a prisoner than anything, but he has to live with his momma until he ages out of foster care because she needs the child-tax and he needs the roof. And between you and me? Tias is twenty, but since his original birth certificate has been sealed and rewritten, his documents say he’s still seventeen. There’s funding for him until he’s nineteen when he’ll age out and be left to his own devices. His momma is no Susan Sarandon type of mom, no, she is more like Halle Berry in Monsters Ball, but Tias, he’s a tough kid, knows how to play the game. I like to think I helped coach him on the art of performance when he first fell in love with Lucia, the Russian princess. When he was a kid, his foster dad broke his nose on the ice because Tias asked if he was his real daddy—it’s funny, you know, since his leather brown complexion didn’t make any sense compared to his foster dad’s porcelain skin. I guess that makes all of us NDN kids hustlers. We’re cheating a system that’s supposed to be doing us good.

  On my bed, I nestle my body inside Tias’s imprint, my knee angled into the curvature of his, my arms stretched wide, my face tilted slightly upwards. His sleeping shape looks like a ballerina. After freeing my body of its fluids, I have no reason to still be awake or to feign a smile. I want to be him too, wear his skin like a suit, cuddle it against my body as if I were a cat pressing myself against my owner’s legs.

  He often sleeps over and helps me prep for work. He doesn’t mind, but he also says he isn’t gay and I tell him me neither. I still don’t think he gets what that means, even when he’s inside me. At first he used to will himself to love me if I made myself more feminine, when I told him I was still Lucia. I’m fine either way, to be honest. I’m like an Etch-a-Sketch—every cell in my body is yours to define. I always tell him he can stay as long as he likes, move into my bachelor if he wants, cause lord knows I can’t keep up a steady stream of seven to eight clients a day to pay this rent. He needs a lot of loving, I can feel it in the spasm of his legs when he comes, see it in the hard curl of his big toe, see it in the gnarly fingernails that his daddy cut too short after we painted them silver. Then again, I need a lot too. There are tons of unfuckable holes in me that need to be filled.

  He’s supposed to come over again later tonight with dinner. I think he said he had a few food stamps for Hamburger Helper, though a part of me wants to text him and say, “Let’s scratch dinner because I got to make some extra cash to take off back to the rez.”

  See, my stepdad died this morning.

  These days, I keep dreaming of Armageddon.

  VIII

  I have this recurring dream where I’m standing on the shore of this ocean. The sky is dark at the edges but lit by the glow of the city behind me. The water is a rich black-blue in colour and when it washes over my feet I see all sorts of things in it: mud, grass, even blood. The tide is retreating—there are dead fish, aluminum cans, and metal bolts lying in the wet sand, which shine in the glaring light of the city. But the water is not calm—it retreats only to gain momentum. And the sea foam is no precious Grecian thing—the froth bubbles black with grit and oil, burning holes into the land. As the waters retreat farther, I see a dark wave rising on the horizon. Every ounce of the ocean’s strength is contained within it. And the city is panicking now—I hear air horns and blackouts and screams as loud as bombs.

  And there I am—a lone brown boy naked on the precipice of the end of the world, the soles of my feet burning in the residue of an angry beach. Turtles scurry between my legs and become boulders on the sand, holding steady onto their own. I hear the doom song of orca, wolves, and bears all around me—the cacophonous cry of an animal feeling death like the texture of gauze sticky with blood and stone. A multitude of birds take flight towards the wave, carrying sticks, grass, and little rodents in their claws. They are going to fly over its crest and make a new home—somewhere over there, in the distant West. Suddenly a large bird, an eagle perhaps, digs its talons into my clavicles and lifts me into the sky. But it doesn’t hurt, as there are grooves in my bones, grommets even, for these claws to fit. I am like a toy in an arcade machine being lifted by a claw. And the higher we go, the colder it gets, so I climb onto its back and nestle in its feathers.

  The great wave is nearing and the skies are now red from a silhouetted sun, flashing lightning. Rain, hail, and winds peck at our faces, but we push on through the storm. The wave is higher than we expected. The great bird won’t make it—it’ll have to pierce through the crest of the wave. The winds are strong enough now that they yank out my hair and scoop out handfuls of feathers from the bird. We are weathered and worn—both of us bleeding in the sky. And I decide, if we are both to live, that I must shield the bird from the impact of the wave. So I climb higher up on its back and wrap my torso around its head, tuck my legs beneath its stout neck, pull my body tight against its, then lean in and whisper, with gentle kisses, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  It’s okay.

  Then with a great flap of its wings, we shoot through the crest of the wave. The coldness of the water stings my flesh, the pressure and force rips open my back as if it were a zipper, and the debris that churns inside the wave bruises our tired bodies. We emerge on the other side of the wave, both a bloody mess—both a sad, scalped sight flying through the sky. We ready ourselves to find a promised land on the other side with the Fur Queen and Whisky Jack waving us home, but instead we see that the water has not calmed, and there are waves as far as the eye can see. The waves are coming—they are here to tak
e back what is rightfully theirs; we are all due—a thunderbird and Nanabush both.

  IX

  Tias always hated having his picture taken, but he sure loved to collect photographs. I liked to snoop through his belongings whenever I went to his house. He had one of us tucked in a collage he made for school, part of a report on Thanksgiving—how cute, I thought. In the picture we’re both poking at a dead porcupine that had curled itself into a ball and looked like a dried-out dandelion. His mom took the picture and I remember how happy she was to see that porcupine dead: “Damn thing’s been eating up our shed!” We all knew there was a porcupine nearby because several of the rez dogs were moping around with white quills stuck to their faces that looked like bones growing out of their mouths. I always thought porcupines were cute little animals, all grey and bunched up like a little elder. Serves people and animals right for being attacked—not everything is yours to touch. But we poked and prodded and played with that carcass for hours, pushing a little too hard on its soft belly, the stick piercing through its skin, which oozed blood.

  When I told my kokum about the porcupine later, she gave me a slap upside the head and made me grab two buckets and take her to its body. When we got to the kill site, it stunk like the combination of moldy cheese and an old man’s BO. But my kokum walked straight up to it, touched its soft spot, and put tobacco down for it. Then she grabbed its little paws, splayed it out like a crucifix, and began ripping the hairs out. “Bring one of them buckets over here,” she said, and when I did, began tossing the clumps of hair in it. “Since you want to play with porcupines, you can help me de-quill one.” I watched as she pulled the hairs out like they were weeds, making a noise like she was ripping grass out of the earth. “Gotta get these guard hairs out first, y’know?” After she was done, she took out her buck knife and started running the blade over its back. When her blade touched its skin, she flicked it downward, and the white quills started flying off. “Now you,” she said, and passed me the knife, forcing me to shave its body clean from ass to neck so that we could harvest its quills. Damn thing stuck me a bunch, and cut my hand up in a few spots, but my kokum just stood over me, arms crossed. “An eye for an eye,” she said. “Hope you learned your lesson.” We filled up both buckets, and when we were done I carried them back home, my arms sore from scraping, while my kokum carried the porcupine which now looked like a giant chicken breast, all pimples and loose skin. “Good for eating,” she said, “and quill work.” At home she skinned the rest of the porcupine and cooked it in a stew, which she made me eat for three days straight, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, until we finished the pot.

  “Always respect the animal,” she said after the stew was all gone, “and use everything if you’re going to kill one. They give their life for you, so you honour their entire body, y’hear?” I nodded, angry as all hell then, but forgiving because my kokum had a way of being easy on me even when she was punishing me. “Now, you want me to fix you a sandwich? Fry you up some eggs?”

  “Heck no, gran, I’ll be full for a year!”

  She laughed, and I ran to put my shoes on.

  “You know, Jon,” she said as I made my way for the door, “porcupine was a kokum once too.”

  When we were kids, Tias’s room was ridiculously masc: posters of the Manitoba Moose and the Winnipeg Jets, Tech Decks and Tony Hawk stickers, a nudie calendar his dad gave him. One night, I was being nosy and rummaging around in his nightstand drawer, and found a photo buried at the bottom.

  “Hey Tias, what’s this?”

  He glanced at the photo. “Oh, that. That’s ju—” He took it from my hands and stared at it intensely. “It’s just an old picture.”

  “Is that you?”

  In the picture was a little boy and an old man sitting together on the steps of a house. They’re both as brown as the mud around them; the old man is chubby, his forehead crinkled like barbed wire, and his eyes deeply sunk into his head. The boy is wearing these oversized aviators and is smiling up at the man beside him, who stares straight at the camera.

  “Boy you’re nosy, you know that?”

  I watched him study the picture again. The house looked like the ones on the rez, two-storeys, an off-green shade, and two windows on the second floor that look like eyes. We always thought our houses looked like Oscar the Grouch’s—maybe they were like that everywhere? Do all rezzes look the same? Like some NDN Sesame Street?

  “Yeah, that’s me, as a little kid before I was, you know, adopted.”

  “That your papa?”

  “No, that’s my gramps.”

  “Can I see it again?” I looked closer and saw the edge of something white and shiny. “That a car?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one that came for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she came to look at my sis and me. It’s a white car. The door opens, a woman comes out in a skirt, and she’s got a lot of pens, notebooks, a bag full of papers.” I look again and see horses in a pen in the background. There’s a screen on their front door that shields the mess in the house behind them.

  “They came to ask us questions, kept saying words like ‘assessment’ and ‘foster.’ My mom says Gramps was a good man, that he had to give us up because he was too old.”

  “You ever see him again?”

  “Only in the newspaper,” Tias remarked. “And only that I survived him.”

  X

  I used to have long hair when I was a kid—my mom placed all her pride in it. To have a brown boy with hair that fell to the small of his back—that was her ceremony. She loved to comb and brush and braid it as I fell asleep on the couch watching Stuart on MadTV late night on weekends. My momma always took his words to heart: “Men are liars,” which she’d repeat like a mantra. Stuart was the totem, the reminder, a promise that I would always be a boy who stuck by her side. I think she liked to picture us like that, me forever in pyjamas sliding down the bannister, and her warning me not to sack myself because that was all some men had going for them.

  When I was young my kokum used to drive us into Selkirk where we would buy cheap clothes from the clearance racks of SAAN and shop for groceries at Extra Foods. I loved visiting that store because you had to pack your own bags and my kokum would let me push the button that worked the conveyor belt drawing cans of kidney beans and tins of baking soda toward us. My mom wasn’t around whenever we went into Selkirk, she had errands to run around town, errands, I would later learn, that meant buying cheap booze from the Red Barn and collecting cocktails of painkillers. But shopping with my kokum in the Plaza, which really had only eight stores, was always my favourite kind of road trip. She’d let me visit the video store across from Extra Foods before we left and I’d browse through their bins of horror films and raunchy comedies. I was allowed to rent one movie every time and I always chose Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Gran and I would watch it on the weekends when she’d babysit me because my mom said Rob Schneider was a toad of a man who grossed her out, but my kokum thought he was hilarious. “Laughter is the sexiest thing,” she’d say. I always wanted an aquarium like Deuce had, to have angel fish swimming around in it, and a loft with zebra print rugs and a chandelier in the entranceway. That was how you knew you had made it back in those days: animal prints and fancy candle holders. On the rez, we only ever had pelts, and our candles didn’t have any holders, but were at least scented to mask the stink of shit and skins.

  There was a Supercuts in the plaza where my kokum got her perms done. Usually I’d get a trim at the same time, to make room for new growth, like the Hutterites did when they set fire to their fields in the fall. This was an intimate time that my kokum and I shared, visiting the beauty parlour as she called it, even though a haircut usually only cost about ten dollars. This time, though, I told her I wanted my hair cut short like Brad Pitt, and she agreed to it, saying he was a good-looking man. So the hairdresser untied my braid and ran her fingers through my hair, untangling knots along the way, her hands as stiff a
s the prodding my mother did when she checked my hair for lice. She then gently pulled my hair together, tied it with an elastic, and with her shears started slicing through it like a utility knife fraying thick rope, shaking me out of my daze. Before I knew it my ponytail was on the floor, sad and static as a dragonfly whose wings had been plucked off. She then buzzed my sides and turned the top of my head into a shaggy faux-hawk. I liked watching her use her Spiker glue, making it tacky in her hands, then rubbing it through my hair to spike it up like a bed of nails. I felt as if I’d become a mace, a club, my head a deadly weapon rather than full of the soft strands my momma braided. I looked like the white boys who ran alongside their mothers playing Gameboys and Tamagotchis in the mall. My kokum said I looked very handsome. I asked the hairdresser if I could take my hair home. “Oh, for a cancer donation?” she asked. Without answering, I scooped it up and put it in my kokum’s purse. She shook her head and said, “They all the same.” The hairdresser gave us a weird stare while ringing us up at the till. My gran tipped her a few bucks so she’d fork over a lollipop to me.

  My kokum had an obsession with whiteness. Momma says that when I was born, my kokum took me into her arms and inspected my hair, my eyes, my body, my little fingers wrapping around her ring finger like seaweed. “Oh, thank God,” she said, “he looks white.” Momma scooped me back up and lay me on her chest. “Thank the creator,” she retorted, “he’s Native.” I can’t fault my kokum for looking up to whiteness, hell, that woman had lived through some intense shit—most of which will remain unknown to me. That’s her business and those were her strategies. I do look white sometimes, though, especially in winter when I’m not sun-kissed and my funds are too tight to afford any bronzer. My whiteness came in handy at times, less so at others; like when the rez boys loved to corner me at the band office to kick my ass for stealing their mommas’ handouts. But whiteness got me here to Winnipeg, lets me enter gay bars without paying cover, lets me transform into different people on Snapchat because white is the base in every colour. When I used to hang out with the gays when I first moved to Winnipeg, the conversation of race was commonplace, and everyone would share examples of their grandparents’ casual racism like, “Oh, she’s pretty for a black girl,” or talk about their obsessions with ancestry.com or 23andMe—tracking down the exact ingredients of their European genetic cocktails. Not that you really had to try that hard—I think white men have a different taste than Nates do; more pineapple and floral scents than Saskatoon jam and Lysol. DNA testing was like a rite of passage for them, they were obsessed with it, sent in vials of spit and swabs of cheeks to unknown places with cheques made out to god-knows-who, all so they could receive a piece of paper that proclaimed, “Here’s who you are.” How did they know it was correct? What made it any different than putting a dollar into a fortune-telling machine? Who says some algorithm wasn’t randomly choosing countries and assigning them to you? And just how in the hell do white people have time to play around with their DNA, they must have a lot of free time, annit? They’d all discuss in great detail their great-great-great grandfathers with names like Seymour or MacDonald with such swollen pride as if they knew the fucker personally, as if that little piece of paper linked them back to christ or something. And of course some lousy kid would find out he was one twenty-fifth Cree and then call himself a proto-Hiawatha and lecture us all on Native issues. “We’re all white here,” my gays would say, then point towards me, the new NDN, “except you, but you look white, I mean, you’re pretty much, you know?”