Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  “I want my twenty dollars,” a man in a muumuu yelled, his hair a crown of thistles, thin, stringy, tangled, his beard serving major lumbersexual realness. “I need to buy her groceries.” He’s always yelling this; old Abraham we call him, because he’s the rare Native who can grow facial hair—an emancipatory act if there ever was one.

  There was this big ol’ NDN girl on the rez named Abraham too—and she had this one cousin, Conner, a real wannabe thug who always thought he was being tracked by the FBI. He was almost as bad as my own aunty who truly believed she was visited and probed by aliens on a regular basis—paranoia is a type of exchange on the rez. Conner and Abraham’s cousin was named Colton, a real annoying punk who used to like to corner me with Abraham at the bingo hall where we hung out and drank. He only really started to hate me after I gave him a hand job at his birthday sleepover after a few weeks of online sexting. And holy hell, let me tell you, when that boy came he damn near drug up the whole of the Assiniboine with him.

  When everyone would go home for the night, Tias and I used to hang back and make out in the bushes. Everyone knew but no one acknowledged it, they were all happy enough to leave two faggot boys to tinker with each other so long as we were out of sight, out of mind. Connor, Abraham, and Colton, the three cousins, once caught us, though, and started pelting us with rocks. Tias and I managed to escape and we booked it through the backroads to my kokum’s, out of breath, sweating, our backs sore and bleeding. These adrenaline rushes were a daily high for me. I liked to think that I was Jean Grey and Tias was my Cyclops, the two of us fighting off the Shi’ar Imperial Guard in a match to determine who would die and who would live. I imagined me in that tight little green costume with the bright yellow visor and him in a skin-tight blue suit showing off that glorious bulge between his legs. We’d both be backed into a corner as waves of enemies showered us with concussion grenades and psionic light beams. Old Jean Grey protecting her man with a force field she struggled to keep up against the constant fight. I wondered if we were like that, two mutant boys shielding one another from all the things that wanted to martyr us—how long could we hold out? Of course, old Jean Grey ended up dead at the end of the episode, but me, well, I was still a young buck with a whole lot of hate and an endless supply of energy. It’s easy to run yourself into the ground, but maybe that ain’t such a bad thing? Jean Grey became the M’Kraan Crystal, didn’t she? What type of jewel would I become?

  “You got twenty dollars?” the muumuu man asked me, his eyes staring down at the sidewalk.

  “Sorry, bud. Here’s a cig.”

  “Thanks, kid,” he said, his eyes now locked onto mine, looking too much like two black holes, all stippled with sunspots like he went up and swallowed a sundog whole. Part of me wanted to crawl up inside those eyes, yell out “Daddy!” and hear only the echo of my voice. But I didn’t, what else was Winnipeg but a giant galactic shithole sucking everything into its white mass, its dwarf stars.

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said.

  I told myself that I would double, if not triple, the number of clients over the next two days so I could make enough money to get home. I also needed enough to cover my rent, to pay back Ernie for the ounce of weed, and then the travel money on top of that. My body was going to hurt, but I remember reading a Shakespeare play at school once that said it takes a pound of flesh to earn a pound of cash. As my momma used to say, if anyone could do it, it would be me, cuz I’m stubborn as a mule and strong as a bear. I guess I was running, like Florence said, fast for my mother, and away from my father; the squaw days aren’t over.

  XIV

  On the rez my aunty lived a good kilometre or two away from my kokum’s house. I loved visiting her; her house was small but cozy—the scents of old wood and the dry warmth of her oven, the sound of a screen door screeching closed, and crackling branches, the howl of winter winds. She wasn’t much of a talker, but she was one hell of a listener—I would go there and tell her stories for hours at a time. She’d always nod and smile, but when I told her something funny she’d laugh out loud, her whole body jiggling.

  Aunty’s best dish was her hangover soup. Hell, all the family would come there on Sunday, fresh off a treaty day’s bender, and gorge on her soup. It was made from beef stock and canned tomato soup and had huge chunks of hamburger, or stewing beef if it was welfare week, and plump macaroni noodles. Of course there was also celery, carrots, onions, and sometimes potatoes—but because every NDN I knew was as carnivorous as could be, sometimes we scooped up only the meat and broth into our bowls. We’d also tear off giant slabs of her famous bannock and smother it in butter and jam—god, that shit was delicious. One time she asked me to knead her bannock because her fibromyalgia was hurting her, but she quickly took over because I didn’t have the stamina to knead more than a few minutes—now, every time I knead bannock, I’m reminded of how strong the women in my family are. As we ate, my uncle would crack open another beer and say, “Hair of the dog, y’know?” while others would be smoking up a storm and butting out their cigarettes in an empty Diet Pepsi can. The men and women would split up into different circles to exchange stories from the weekend, usually about who they snagged, but told it with different manners. The men talked about how suave they were, with amazing pickup lines like “Hey girl, I ain’t no one-minute-man, I’m on NDN time, eh.” Slack old jokes. The women, on the other hand, would tell on who they ended up fighting with, or which man they had to slap away. But there were tender stories too, like how they took care of someone if they got too drunk.

  It was always terrifying trying to get to my aunt’s place, though; I’d have to walk down this empty backroad and I was always afraid of being attacked by a bear. One time, when I slept over, we woke up in the morning to the sound of crumpling tin and a loud thud on her wooden porch. We peeked out the window to investigate and found a black bear sitting next to her garbage can, eating a banana peel. And my aunt, tiny as she was, and in her paper-thin nightgown, picked up her corn broom and stormed outside in the cold January air. She was fearless, that woman; she walked outside barefoot and marched right up to that bear and struck him on the nose with her broom, once, twice, bam. And then that great bear stood up on its hind legs, its claws the length of scissors, and grunted; but my aunt, tough as nails, smacked that bear again on its head and yelled at the top of her voice, “Git! G’wan you, out, out, git!” The bear stared at her quizzically for a few seconds, then lowered himself and jogged back into the bush. My aunt came back inside, her feet red as the beans she cooked in her chili, and dusted herself off as if it was nothing, then went about her morning routine of frying up bologna and yesterday’s mashed potatoes. That was the only time in my life I heard her yell—and lord, I would never want to be on the other end of that vicious scream of hers. If it can scare away a bear, I knew it had the volume to chase away men and redcoats too.

  My aunty always told me that if I ever ran into a bear, to stand my ground to avoid being attacked. Whenever I heard a twig snap, I’d jump around and get into my most aggressive bear stance—but most times it was a squirrel or else my kokum’s cat, Jynx. That old cat loved to play tricks and since I always fed her my leftovers she followed me everywhere. Her favourite game seemed to be “Scare-the-fuck-out-of-Jonny-as-he-walks-home.” She would creep up behind me and pounce on my legs when I was least expecting it. And when I got home, she would make loud noises that sounded more like giggles than meows.

  My aunty’s advice came in handy when I finally did run into a bear. It was pretty small, but when I tell the story it’s as giant as the one in The Revenant. Anyway, it looked fierce as fuck when it stormed out of the bush while I was walking and sat down on the road ahead of me. I instantly thought of that ol’ bear statue at the zoo, Winnie—but I wasn’t no cavalry vet, I was more like a Christopher Robin. As it sat there staring at me, my aunty’s warnings ran through my head: “Stare ’em in the eyes, stomp your feet, hell, take a step forward if you have to, be big.” So I stared back at
him. His eyes were as dark as my mom’s skin, and he had a little patch of white fur on his chest that looked like one hell of a deformed butterfly. I stomped my feet but he didn’t stir, he only stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth, his perky little ears standing at attention. I raised my hands above my head to make myself look bigger, but that didn’t work, it only made him get off his ass and take a few steps toward me, his large floppy tongue bouncing with each step he took. As he moved closer, I began to panic, and thought of the other warning my aunty taught me: “Make noise.” “Git!” I screamed, but my voice cracked like a pubescent teen, and the bear stood his ground. So I got my iPod out and hit play; the first song that came on was Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” I turned up the volume to maximum and started running toward the bear. He backed off and ran to the side of the road, afraid of the cavalcade of voices coming through my earphones; I guess he thought I was walking with ghosts? He was still staring at me as I ran past him, as fast as my legs could carry me to my aunty’s house. I turned around and saw that the bear was now lying in the road on its back, and for some reason its penis was erect as all hell. When I told my aunty what had happened, she looked outside her window and saw the bear lying in the road and had a good ol’ laugh. “For godsakes, m’boy, that’s just a cub.” I didn’t say anything else, just went into her spare room and listened to that Nirvana song on repeat until I fell asleep. I wondered if it was the right thing to do to scare the bear like that—can you scare a bear into an erection? Did I have a right to summon ghosts? Hell, I was like that NDN shaman, Taylor, in Poltergeist; heck, I often talk to myself and wonder if I’m really talking with myself or if I’m conversing with spirits. I guess I’m always “forever in debt to your priceless advice.”

  XV

  The best advice I’ve ever received was from my mom when I was eight. See, my momma is the toughest NDN in the world—a real hard-ass, but the kind you need, the kind who can break rocks and divine rivers. She walked into my room all casual-like, her hair knotted into a ratty bun and wearing the gold glitter of Elvis’s face on her T-shirt caulked with flour. She took a liking to a thunderbird I was beading.

  “Who’s that for?” she asked.

  “No one,” I shrugged. Little did she know that I was actually making it to give as a gift to Brayden Walker—the first boy I ever liked. Brayden was a common Nate name, but that’s what you get when you live on the rez: a million Braydens, sixteen Jasmines, and a little femme-boy-fatale named Jonny. Momma picked up the bird I was making and held it up against the window to inspect it. The little beads dangled in the dusty afternoon light, and its form created a shadowy inverse thunderbird on the floor—a great half-winged creature on the carpet not two feet from the stain from a Budweiser can.

  “You know your dad was a whatchamacallit?”

  “Thunderbird?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. It’s good,” she finally said. “Real good. What you making off it?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “It’s a gift.”

  “Boy, you better be kidding me.”

  When I shook my head, she furrowed her brow, revealing the chickenpox scars above her temples. That was how you knew she was real mad—a deep oval imprint that hid beneath the lines in her skin, looking like an angry eye. “Work like this? Boy—you’re something, you know that? Really something. Don’t you ever let me catch you doing this again.”

  I asked her what she meant, half shaking, thinking she knew about Brayden and that she’d reach for her wooden spoon and give me a lickin like the schoolyard boys used to do when they’d swipe at me with their hand-me-down shoes and dirty fingernails. “You’re Oglala,” they’d tell me, “not some fairy city boy.” When they walked away, I used to mutter beneath my breath, “No, it’s ooh-la-la,” and vogue in the blood and sand. Really, I was neither—I was Oji-Cree—but to them it was all the same.

  “You’re good with your hands,” she said. “And people notice that. If you want to survive out there, boy, you got to learn how to sell yourself. Work like this? Shit, you could earn an easy ten dollars selling it to them touristy white folk. Hell, maybe twenty if you looked sad enough. Listen, m’boy, if you’re good at something, don’t you ever go doing it for free, you hear me? When you grow up, you’re gon’ learn all sorts of things—find what you good at and put a number to it, you hear? And when you get that number, you double it. That how you gonna make it. Lord ain’t give you these skills so that you be making them for no punk that don’t give two hoots about you. Don’t be thinking I don’t know who this for—you like that Walker boy. I’m fine with that, son, Creator, he made you for a reason—you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me, but what’s not fine is you selling yourself short. You gotta leave if you wanna survive, and when you do you’re gonna need the steadiness of those hands, m’boy. You’re gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine.”

  Momma’s lesson is one I’d hold dear from that moment on—me, the rock breaker? Ain’t no NDN glitter princess ever been called that, heck, I was more like the one who got them off.

  XVI

  I drew myself a bath, my tub the grungy yellow of cigarette-stained fingers, hairs clinging to its sides and perimeter. As I sat down in it, I thought of the Red River that gushed blood and guts and catfish a few blocks away. I wondered how cold the rapids in Peguis were right now, those fat leeches waiting for a fish to suckle off; here, my penis, wriggling in the bath, I too am cheap tackle. Those frothy waters full of Lucky cans and severed hands and oak leaves that clogged our drain pipes.

  Water was a mentor to me, a playmate; water was a feral child. I used to sit on the bank of the rapids, feet dangling in the stream. If I stayed still long enough, the crawfish would climb over them, inspect the grooves between my toes. What would life be like if I were a crawfish? A little pest that ages too fast, only three months and then they’re plunged into the cruel world of adulthood. To be a crawfish is to be in constant fear of your own self, to be ripped apart by kin who pierce your soft spots with teeth and claws that shred you from the inside out. To be a crawfish, I thought, is the best primer for survival; if you can make it as a crawfish, you can make it as anything. I plucked the crawfish from my toes, let the water have it, let it fumble, scramble, try to live; the rapids are an apocalyptic Mad Max landscape. I watched it catch its groove, then tumble into the ducts and disappear. Who knows where it would end up? I hoped it would continue living, even if only one more day, but who really knows these things. The water is a furious road and the only words we can say to one another are simple: witness me.

  The water in Winnipeg was just as feral as the rapids in Peguis—the only difference was that this river ate children, not crawfish. My kokum told me that Manitoba was a name taken from the Cree, manitowapow, which meant something like “the strait of the spirit.” She said it was the sound of the drum, of water beating the rocks in a constant thrum, noise like a round dance where the water would ask you to sing alongside it. The river is a space of convergence, where streams and currents intersect briefly, an orgy of kissing streams, a hub of sex and slapping fins. The water is the colour of rust, the kind of rust that becomes a sequin when a raindrop hovers over it. When I look out over the Red I see the strait, but I wonder just what in the hell a spirit is doing out there. How many Manito? Was mine out there too? Why would the water want to straighten my spirit? Ain’t that why I have two?

  The elders used to tell us to humble ourselves to the water; I heard them in the speeches of Immortan Joe: “Do not become addicted to water.” But water was always a shameful thing for me: to piss, to sweat, to spit, to ejaculate, to bleed, to cry. How in the hell do we humble ourselves to water when we’re so damn humiliated by it? Life ain’t always as easy as an old story that never changes, y’know? And we weren’t always so embarrassed of ourselves as water; we were basins of thought too once. Bathing was a tumultuous experience when I was a kid. My mom would run me a bath, but the water would be the temperature of the lava in Dante’s P
eak. I would feel like Granny Ruth paddling through acidic volcanic liquid in my mother’s bath water, my legs turning pink and tingling, the heat stinging my nose, all the while my mother reassuring me it’s “not even hot.” Then she would climb in, her tummy and breasts falling loose in the water, her stretch marks like footprints on her belly and hips. She’d nestle me in between her legs and ease us both back into it, the hot water cradling us, covering my chest, opening up my lungs, my exhales a steady stream of dirt and mucus and phlegm that purged themselves from my body. And her hair, her long brown hair, snaked around the tub, wrapping itself around my arms, making me look like I too had hair the length of a horse’s tail. My mother would wash us both with L’Oréal kids shampoo, the watermelon kind, a green bottle with a pink lid, and an eye peeking out at us from the label. It was the shampoo that never burned my eyes, Momma assured me of that. And while we lathered up our hair, I built myself a pair of breasts just like my mother’s using the soap from my head. “Momma, you think I’m pretty?” I’d ask and she’d reply, “M’boy, ain’t no one ever looked better.”

  We’d cuddle in the tub until the water turned cold and opaque, until our nipples turned to points and our fingers pruned like Kokum’s. My mom would get out first and I’d remain in the water, gurgling it in my mouth, the taste of soap, dirt, skin, sweat—I drank it in small sips until my belly felt hard as a rock. I liked to put my head beneath the water, listen to time slowing down, the sound of my blood pulsing in my head, the distorted voices of Roger and Mom arguing downstairs, the enhanced sound of their footsteps which made their own music, gave their own cues. In the water I was beautiful: my boy body was genderless in the tub, my penis too shrivelled to really look like anything but the nether regions of a Barbie doll, my nipples shielded by a facecloth, covering a shame that would never be mine. The water never set me straight. The water leaked with me down the drain.