Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  I never actually told them I was Native because I didn’t want to have to out myself once again. If I did, they’d have started up a round of invasive questions, like a game of Guess Who, and I would sit there, never having been more violated than being the prize during a round of I Spy. You have to perform in any situation, so you may as well pick your battles. Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer. You can’t win in every situation, that’s just the way it is. Best to avoid those topics, save your energy for when you’re down to your last pack of cigarettes and ramen noodles. Shift when you need to—become your own best medicine. I think of my kokum when those conversations happen. “Thank God he’s white.” Thank someone, I’ll think, whoever the hell is keeping me alive.

  When my momma saw me with short hair and a faux-hawk, she cried harder than I’d ever heard her cry. “The fuck?” she said. “The fuck you do?” She called Kokum a goddamned curse and me a good-for-nothing. She bawled her eyes out, her face like the portrait of “The Scream,” you would have thought someone had died. “You ruined him,” she kept repeating through sobs, “you ruined my boy.” Maybe a part of me did die that day, the day when the braid was severed from my head. But who knows? Maybe I’m like the NDN Athena, growing out of the head of Zeus, or hell, more like giving head to Zeus. My hair is the mediator between my selves, my spirits, my brownness and my queerness, my sexiness and my disgrace, the scar of all our pain.

  XI

  Fifty bucks would be enough cash to make my way to Selkirk—but I was looking for a ride back to Peguis and that was going to cost at least a couple hundred bills. If I had some cousins out here who actually liked me, I could probably bum a ride from them, but it’s hard to convince these Rambo-bravado, gangster-wannabe thugs that they share any quantum of blood with an urban NDN, Two-Spirit femmeboy.

  Roger, my mom’s boyfriend, who she insisted I call stepdad, died from cirrhosis of the liver yesterday. He was a pigheaded, alcoholic, homophobic sonuva—but he made my mom happy, I don’t know why or how, never cared to ask. Maybe it was because he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” to her at their wedding, which was less a wedding and more a tarp-covered jig-and-drink. Dolly was my mushom’s favourite singer, and my mom used to tell me he’d sing it to her when she was a little girl. All the NDNs on the rez loved that song; it’s like a rite of passage or something. Everyone in my family has taken a piece of Dolly. My mom took her lips, my real dad took her lyrics thinking he was always in the way and that was why he had to go, my kokum took her grace, and I took her body by becoming, what my clients like to call me, the best little whorehouse. It used to bother me, whore, but not so much anymore because, one: I don’t sell sex, I sell fantasy and companionship; and two: when they call me what they call me it only helps me to know that I’ve found a home in my self. I learned that when I read this poem in high school by a dreary old white lady named Emily Dickinson. In it she calls herself nobody and asks the reader, “Who are you?” When our class first read that poem, they all laughed, thinking the line read, “I’m nobody, whore you?”

  Then Kelly, one of the toughest NDN kids on the rez because he had six brothers and fifteen cousins, loudly announced, “Hey Hoover, sounds like you, you ol’ cocksucker, you,” and the whole class laughed. But so what if I liked sex, right? God, we all think about it; you’re probably thinking about it right now. So I took these women and sewed them to myself like a tattered rag doll. I’m a little bit of Dolly and I’m a little bit of Em.

  I’m nobody, whore you?

  We’re all here, like Em, on what she calls this undiscovered continent, hell, the reservation is a ghost-world, a prison, a death camp. Although, unlike Em, some of us just have deeper prisons on this undiscovered continent. There was me, feeling like the only gay NDN in the whole world, voguing and serving face in the basement of a reservation death camp situated in the farthest reaches of this undiscovered continent—now I tell my clients to dial “1” if they need me.

  So anyway, Roger, my semi-stepdad, mostly-hated pseudo-father figure, yeah, he died yesterday and my mom called me to ask me to come to the funeral. I have two more days to get to the rez, which is about a five-hour drive away when combined with all the stops and pickups you’d have to take riding with a roundup driver. The wake will be going on until Friday, I’d never make it to that but, I told myself, I will make the funeral, I have to. Problem is, I have no money. I spent it all on some bronzer and banana powder at Sephora—I’m big into contouring these days, and a bit of bronzer really makes my cheekbones look like Maleficent, trust me, clients eat that shit up. So I have to earn nearly three hundred dollars in two days to raise enough funds to bum a ride and hitch my way back to the rez. Lord knows I didn’t care about seeing Roger, truth be told—part of me is happy to see him go—but I have to be there for my mom. She’s the toughest NDN in the world, I tell you, but I’ve seen how easily she broke when Roger went on his benders, so I can’t even imagine how messed up she is feeling right now.

  That, and I am dying, unconscious pun I swear, to visit my kokum again. On my birthday two years ago she called me and told me she needed to see me, that she had a story for me. See, my kokum is the first person in my family I’ve ever come out to, aside from my mom who I came out to a year later. And it was tough. I thought she would give me a lickin with her wooden spoon and tell me “Nononono!” But she just listened on the other end of the line while I cried into the receiver. All I could hear was her breathing deeply. When I eased up on the waterworks, it wasn’t clear if she was still there—the line had gone silent. I wasn’t sure if I was confessing to myself or maybe even some voyeur at MTS listening in on my conversation. Had she hung up? Was that the end of my kokum and me?

  “Gran, you still there?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she replied, and as I hiccupped from all the crying, she asked, “You done, m’boy, or what?”

  When I caught my breath and softly answered yes, she laughed. “Heck, like I didn’t even know, Jonny. Why you think I gave you them earrings last year?”

  “Because I told you I needed them for art class?”

  “Jonny, m’boy, your kokum old but she ain’t dull. You’s napêwisk-wewisehot, m’boy, Two-Spirit. You still my beautiful baby grandkid no matter what you want to look like or who you want to like.”

  I wanted to question her on what she meant by Two-Spirit, but she cut me short by yelling that she had to go, her frybread oil was ready.

  “You come down here, m’boy, and I’ll tell you a story about who you are. You come and you’ll know. Kihtwâm, m’boy, kisâkihitin.”

  It’s funny, NDN families only seem to reconvene when someone’s dead. It doesn’t take much to make an NDN cry, but a death, that makes them stoic as all hell; well, stoic and maybe hungry. You’ll never have a better meal than at an NDN funeral.

  And that’s the truth.

  XII

  My kokum used to babysit me a lot when I was a kid whenever my mom was down at the Royal, celebrating everything from birthdays to just surviving the week. I didn’t mind; I loved sleeping over. She tried to teach me how to bead, but my fingers didn’t have the dexterity to push a needle through something so tiny. We’d bake pies and she’d tell me to take two home, one for me, one for my momma for when she woke up. I loved exploring her basement, my kokum was a hardcore hoarder and kept everything everyone ever gave her. All of our Christmas presents, birthday gifts, all the knick-knacks we gave her were stored down there. And if I didn’t crash on her couch and watch reruns all night, I usually slept in the basement on a mattress, a makeshift bedroom barricaded in by years’ worth of gifts. My kokum had a hilarious way of gift-giving—she’d often re-gift you what you gave her a year or two earlier if she hated it or was mad at you, but on the other hand if you were in her good books, she’d give you something she made herself. She was always knitting pot holders and wash cloths, much to my mom’s annoyance—we had drawers full of them.


  One Christmas my mom took us to Selkirk to shop for gifts. I was on the hunt for the perfect present for Kokum and made my way into this Hallmark store which was full of journals, cards, and ornaments. I browsed up and down every aisle with the fifteen dollars I had saved up from three months’ worth of allowance and rolled coins. There were all sorts of random things in there: crystals, rocks, little dream catchers for your car, and a whole row of glass animals. There was one in particular that I liked, this frog in a straw hat lying against a rock, fishing in a little pond. I was eyeing it up when the cashier came over to me.

  “Do you want to take a closer look at it?” She bent down and unlocked the glass case it was in, then held it out for me to look at. I looked that glass frog in the eye, and after much deliberation, I decided that this was the one.

  “How much?” I asked.

  She looked at the tag. “$34.99,” she said. I followed her to the register and pulled out the two fives I had, then spilled the rolls of coins I had saved up all over the counter.

  “Is this enough?”

  Just then my mom came into the store. “Here you are, heck, I’ve been looking for you for like twenty minutes.”

  The cashier laughed. “I’ll let you two talk it over,” she said, and busied herself with another customer.

  “Mom, can I buy this?”

  “This thing? What for?”

  “For Kokum.”

  “The hell is she gonna do with this?” She took a closer look, then saw the price. “Thirty-five dollars for a frog? You know how many things we could buy for that?”

  “I think she’ll like it,” I said, and tugged on her hand. I had this weird way of lacing myself into my mom whenever she was mad at me. I’d stand on her toes, put my head beneath her shirt, stare up at her breasts, and twine my fingers into hers. When I did it in public, she’d usually get mad.

  “Not today, Jonny, put it back—we can’t afford it.”

  And I burst into tears, and boy, did I cry. I scooped up my money off the counter, stormed out of the store, and ran to the nearest bathroom, where I locked myself in a stall to sulk. When I came out my mom was waiting for me, keys in hand, with a bag from SAAN.

  On our way back to the rez, we stopped in Teulon for a couple cans of pop. Before continuing on, my mom handed me a piece of gum and turned the radio off.

  “You know, Jonny, we can’t always get what we want,” she said.

  “I know, Momma, it’s just—I saved up all this money to shop.”

  “I saw, look at all that cash, good on you.”

  “Whatchu think I can get Kokum, then? Can you help me make her something?”

  She nodded toward the SAAN bag on the backseat. “Just reach in, for godsakes, don’t go snooping around.” I put my hand inside and pulled out the frog wrapped in bubble wrap. “Don’t tell Rog, okay?” she said.

  I cradled the frog for a minute before placing it back inside the bag, then lunged at my mom and hugged her. “I love you, Momma, I just love you!” I said, making her swerve the car across the road.

  “Cut the shit, Jonny, you’re gonna make me crash.” I scooched back over to my seat and pulled out my cash.

  “Here’s my money,” I said, “to help pay.”

  “Nah, m’boy. You earned it, you keep it.”

  She pulled me toward her and eventually I fell asleep with her arm around me. When we got home I wrapped that frog in a gym bag I had sewed in home ec and hid it for three weeks, trying my hardest not to go and blab to Kokum that I got her something right nice. And that old frog’s still up in her living room, covered in dust; he’s been sitting there fishing for years now, sitting beside a picture of my kokum and Mush.

  Kokum and I did all sorts of crazy shit when she babysat me. She used to tell me scary stories about the wendigo and Nanabush, stories about ghosts and aliens. She had an obsession with horror and was dead set that she would see Bigfoot at least once in her life. Once she took me out into the bush late at night, like she used to do with my uncles, flashlights in hand, to look for him.

  “People say they saw him, y’know, right here in these woods,” she said. As we explored the nooks and crannies of the bush, she told me all about how she once saw a UFO, saw it with all of its lights coming straight toward her home before it suddenly took off up and over to the north. “You know,” she said, stopping me and grabbing my hand so our flashlights were pointing up at the sky, “they say there was a UFO crashing that night in Jackhead. Military and all, buncha people got asked to evacuate, weird eh?” We continued on through the bush, forging our own damn paths because my kokum was a bad ass like that. We never did find Bigfoot, but we did find a lot of trap lines and even a lynx that was snared, slowly dying in the night.

  Sometimes we listened to her favourite song, “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone. Heck, when we did, we used to throw on her old shawls and dance around as the adults sang. “Hell, what the matter with your head?” they’d sing and Kokum said my dancing looked like the fancy shawl dance, but I thought I looked more like an epileptic groundhog. The shawls were too big for me and the fabric draped beneath my feet, but we danced however the hell the song directed us to—jumping in the middle of the living room, hopping off the couches, spinning in circles with our arms splayed like airplanes, and the fabric twirling so fast that all we saw were brief flashes of our faces through the blur.

  And then I guess one time I got too close to the steps and fell down the stairs, face forward down fourteen steps, cracked my collar-bone. But I was still full of endorphins, didn’t feel the pain right away, just sat there looking up at my kokum whose face was full of horror, her hands cupped around her cheeks, her mouth saying “M’boy” over and over beneath the roar of the music, “Come and get your love, come and get your love, come and get your love now” repeating.

  When my mom came to pick me up two days later, she freaked out. “The fuck? He did what?” She yelled at my kokum for what seemed like hours.

  “You’re good for nothing, you know that? Nothing!” she screamed at her.

  “I didn’t mean—he fell.”

  “How the hell you let a boy crack his damn neck?”

  I tried to intervene. “Mommy, I didn’t crack—”

  “Hush up,” she said, then turned back to my kokum. “Boy, I can’t even trust you to watch my boy for one goddamn night.”

  And then my kokum was crying with a loud wail that wracked my bones with aches, a vibrato that buzzed on my clavicle, stung me good. I clung to her apron, holding tightly onto her with my good arm, as my mom pulled me off her and forced me up the stairs. She didn’t realize she was pulling on me where my arm was slung. I yelled for Kokum and heard her crying at the bottom of the stairs. As we were about to leave, she ran up.

  “You take care of that boy, Karen, you damn well hear me?” She pushed her words out with laboured breath.

  “Hmph, you want me to take advice from the woman who broke my baby?”

  “Least I was here, Karen. At least I was here.”

  My mom glared at her and balled up her fists, but then she just opened the door and we left. For the next two weeks she babied me, made me Cup-a-Soup, rented us scary movies—and saved up all her energy to find a way to apologize to Kokum. I had to wear the sling for a couple weeks; the fall left me with a dent in my clavicle, wide enough to contain both of those women’s many tears.

  XIII

  I threw my iPod on and made my way down Portage to snatch up a cheap bottle of OJ from the Dollar Tree. Florence Welch was belting “The dog days are over” into my ears. Hard to believe, I thought, on the very street where Idle No More thrummed and flashdanced and marched—in the very mall where they were arrested. Môniyâw, I thought, so disillusioning. I strutted by the Marlborough where that Nate boy, Pratt, went missing, the same night that I too was walking by there. All the Nates down the street were wearing plaid jackets ripped at their seams, their white shirts stained with Lucky and spit and piss and the grime of Winnip
eg. That sweet yellow smoke that foxed their skin like an old tome—gotta make your way into those museums if you want to survive. I wondered what would happen if I sat down here on the stoops of the hotels, passing around hooch and comparing boils and skin tags and all things that look diseased but pass as a normal NDN aesthetic. Would you walk by me like a dog unleashed but too lost to sniff his way back home? Implement drones to monitor the streets and arrest suspicious-looking types?