Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  Here, in my own bathtub alone, I think of Momma, I think of those rapids. I think of how they split rocks and dissolved them into sand; I think of how water crafted this whole damn planet, carved it into animals. I think of home. Just why in the hell did I ever decide to leave? Kokum’s gone and Momma’s got the sickness of loneliness, the kind that’ll turn your liver into coal. Leaving made me feel as if I’d split myself; this throb, a residue of pride, having left—for the life of me, all I wanted now was this: to regress, to crawl backwards into time, into a womb that smells of earthworms and eggshells, for my knowledge of the world and its pains to be a second thought; for my idea of home being bound by only four walls on the rez. All I wanted was to shift back up inside my mother in the bath water of her uterus, to count time as a crawfish would, for days to mean something other than another notch on the wall, another treaty dollar earned. I wanted that. I wanted all of that. How easy, how warm, how outlandishly impossible, I thought. Just how in the hell are we supposed to live in a world that ages us like fish? I washed my hair with Head and Shoulders, killed the bugs that were making a life on my scalp. I felt my self in the tub, my blood stiffened to a point, made my own throbbing drumbeat, my own manitowapow, my own round dance being the huff of breath you make when the nerves on your cock tingle like Pop Rocks. I came into my bathwater, let the residue swim and eventually drown in the tub.

  “If you come back,” I said, “don’t ever come back as an NDN, y’hear?”

  XVII

  I sometimes have this dream where I’m walking around naked in the mountains—it’s spring and the purple seeds in the pods begin to open up and bloom into a lilac. Bees buzz around it, their wings slicing through the air, their bodies velvet smooth in a way that reminds me of how I like to shave my pubes. The buds drip a lavender dew and even the rods are golden and erect. All the land is horny as fuck. The treaty land has awakened and the berries are thick with juice that threatens to burst out of their infant seeds. Butterflies swarm in a patch of sunlight, their wings a collective noise that sounds like crinkling plastic or a consistent, hearty fap. Little squirrels gather nuts around me and a doe walks by with her fawns, the little ones suckling on their mother’s leather nipples. Their fur is a rich brown and their spots remind me of the war paint I’ve seen in movie westerns.

  The earth is moist from an early morning rain, the grass glittering like glass. In the mud there is a set of prints: something with long sharp claws. Maskwa, I think, he has come. I tear one of my cigarettes in half, pour the tobacco over the prints, lay my hand on top of it, and press it into the earth. I wonder if Manito is hearing me say over and over and over: kisâkihitin. And this round dance song comes into my head—I don’t know when I’ve ever heard it, but I know the words in this dream, I don’t have to Google it. The constant thump of the drum sounds like a rabbit’s leg pounding on stretched deer skin. I am on all fours to fit my hands into the prints as I push the tobacco down farther—down as deep as I can, into the breast of askîy. As I push, twigs and little stones cut my hands, and blood pools into the mud, seeps into my lacerations. I taste soil in my mouth.

  A branch snaps behind me. I don’t turn around but stay low to the ground, hovering on all fours, penis dragging in the mud. A warm breath snakes down the nape of my neck and a fat black tongue works its way through the grooves of my cartilage. It probes my ear and the suction from its tongue pulls on my lobe. The tension reminds me of my kokum when she plays with my ears. A fuzzy chest presses against my bare back—the weight forces me down into the mud, and part of me wonders if this is nôhtâwiy. The song of the round dance grows louder in my ears, unfiltered by the tongue that scrapes and cleans me—wabanonong manidoo owaabamaan anishinaabek. I can’t help but cry—I don’t understand the words but my tendons do, my bones react and jig in the skin. The beat doubles, rabbit and beaver thwack in conversation. I feel something hard press against the small of my back—zhaawanong manidoo owaabamaan anishinaabek. He places his paws on top of my hands, they feel like the bottom of my mom’s mocs. Then his claws press into the tips of my fingers, piercing them, blood and foam leaking out from my fingertips—ningaabii’anong manidoo owaabamaan anishinaabek. All of the forest is watching maskwa top me as the birds cackle and avert their eyes. A woodpecker sits high in a tree and riddles the trunk with a beat that dubs the round dance—kiiwedinong manidoo owaabamaan anishinaabek. Maskwa unsheathes himself, the baculum stiff and ready; he enters me with a hefty breath and it doesn’t hurt. I wonder if he’s getting ready to eat me. He digs through my body, feels for the bean in me, buzzes against it, looks for the bone that holds my tapwewin. I tell him there’s nothing there, but he scrapes from me a seed from when I was kikâwiy, anishinaabek-nehiyaw iskwewayi-napêw. And as he pulls out, he jiggles the bean again, makes me come into the mud, licks the salt from my eyes—all of this treaty land is filled with me. As he leaves, the music fades, my heart-drum-beat lulls to a slow pace, my body relaxes, lets loose its fluids. Kâkike, he huffs, kisâkihitin kâkike.

  When I’ve hurt my Cree, well—still, I dream of maskwa.

  XVIII

  Gym class was something I always loathed as a kid. I was one of the “shy guys” who’d change in the bathrooms, or hang back until everyone else was finished showering, or else earn myself another Emmy by faking a cold. I was chubby as all hell and the other boys used to whip me with towels or climb over the stalls and make fun of me changing. Once, I worked up the courage to change alongside them, and they shied away. “What are you looking at, perv?” one of them asked, and then they all changed beneath their towels or behind locker doors. All my uncles had round bellies with marks that looked like scrapes; I thought they looked beautiful, sexy even. Tias would sometimes hang back with me; sometimes we’d skip out together and smoke with the Bad Girls, other times he’d wait to change alongside me.

  After baseball practice once, we stayed back as usual, pretending to look for something I’d lost. Our teacher just rolled his eyes and went inside as all the other boys filed in like restless bear cubs, jumping on one another. Whenever a couple of them started a fight, the other boys would throw off their shirts, form a circle, and chant, “Fight!” The two boys would circle one another, hunched low to the ground, fists moving like shifting eyes. “Skoden,” they’d say back and forth, jutting out their chins and lips. And coach would never stop them. “Boys,” he’d say, “what you gonna do?”

  After we figured the boys were finished their showers, Tias and I went inside. We watched each other undress, but our bodies were nothing new, no need to compare them because those geographies had already been explored. But I loved how delicately he undressed, neatly folding his shorts and shirt, then wrapping a towel around his waist, his hair tousled like a feral. We showered and as we did I followed the way the water drained over his body, snaking down his chest, threading around his penis, and pooling beneath his soles which were thick as deer hide from running around barefoot all the time. And when he held his hands out, the water would drain down his arms and pour from his fingertips.

  Sometimes I’d go to his house when his parents went out to bingo and hired a babysitter. I never understood why they had a babysitter, every other NDN family I knew had a ton of cousins who’d watch your kids for a few bucks. The babysitter’s name was Ginny. She was a few years older than us and always planned games for us to play. She’d also bring over movies like Dumb and Dumber and Spice World. We watched those films a million times, quoted them like lifelines. When Tias would get mad at me, I’d just repeat à la Lloyd Christmas, “Tias…I took care of it,” and that was all we needed to resolve the argument. Ginny liked to give us makeovers and colour our nails so we could be posh too—a tradition we wholeheartedly signed up for. We’d play with lipsticks and eyeliners, then paint her over too, like a half-assed version of Elisha Cuthbert. And she made sure to clean our faces off before Tias’s parents got home.

  But it was nail painting we loved the most. How she’d prep our nails with alco
hol, ask us which colour we wanted. Our favourite was this silver-glitter one that shone in the light when it was dry.

  “That’s right boss,” Tias would proudly exclaim when she was done, examining his fingers.

  Ginny would slide the brush over our nails with this stern exactitude, her eyes squinting. She never second-guessed herself, and I always wondered how she could be so precise. Every time I tried to do anything so determined, my body would tremble and my head would throb; I never had a damn chance at winning a round of Operation because of it. One, two, three slides of the brush and our fingers were transformed into high glamour, like the Sailor Scouts we used to watch on TV. And then she’d apply a layer of gloss that really made them shine. “Whew,” she’d say, fanning the air with her hands, “this stuff is strong.” Tias and I used to breathe in the scent of the paint, which cleared our nostrils and let us pretend we were high.

  As meticulous as we were about cleaning everything up before Tias’s parents got home, one night they came home early, his dad a little drunk and a little salty at losing at bingo again. As they pulled up in the driveway, Ginny quickly cleaned up all her makeup, turned off the movie, and told us to go wash up. We tried to scrub off the paint as quick as we could, but we had let it dry too much while we were all dancing to the Spice Girls. Ginny tried to stall them at the door.

  “How was yer night?” she asked.

  “Same old same, dear,” Tias’s mom said, draping her coat over a chair.

  “Fucking waste of time and money, if you ask me,” his dad announced. “Who the hell stands a chance of winning when you got a whole row of old-ass women dabbing like goddamn machines?”

  Ginny laughed. “Yeah, they’re pretty good, eh?”

  “Good? Goddamn cheaters,” he said, throwing his keys onto the table. “At least the drinks are cheap at the hall, though.”

  “Oh, hey Gin, do you mind if we pay you next week?” his mom asked. “We had to gas up with our last twenty.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” Ginny put on her coat and grabbed her backpack. Tias’s mom offered to give her a lift home, which she accepted.

  Once they were gone, his dad sat down on the couch and turned the TV channel to ESPN as we inched our way slowly into the living room, our hands in our pockets. “What you boys do tonight?” he asked and we shot-the-shit, told him we watched TV and played some video games. Tias went over to hug him.

  “Don’t ever play bingo, boys, y’hear? Save your money.”

  “All right,” Tias replied, pushing himself out of the hug.

  His dad looked down at Tias’s hands. “The hell’s that?”

  “What?” Tias said, putting his hands back into his pockets.

  His dad pulled them out. “You boys painting your nails?”

  “Oh, that’s just paint from school, must have gotten on me.”

  I tried to interject. “Yeah, we did this—”

  He pulled Tias’s hands up to his nose. “Don’t know what you two think you’re doing lying to me.” He let go of Tias’s hands, then stared at the TV for a minute. We thought we were good. We scurried back to his room and sighed with relief.

  “Close one, eh?” I said.

  “Tias, get your ass out here right now!” his dad yelled from the kitchen. Tias gulped, got up, and told me to stay in the room. But I followed, peeking out from behind the wall. I saw his dad with a pair of nail clippers in his hand.

  “How many fucking times I tell you to cut this girly shit, huh?”

  “I’m sorry, we—”

  Before Tias could finish, his dad snatched his hand from his pocket and pushed it down on the counter, held his fingers out with his, and began cutting.

  “You gotta stop hanging around that girly-boy, y’hear me?”

  I could hear the sharp clip of metal on nail. When he cut one too short, Tias winced. “Oh, shut up, this is nothing,” his dad said, and kept on cutting until Tias’s fingers were bleeding.

  “Oh, grow some goddamn balls,” his dad said. I started to come out from hiding but caught Tias’s eyes, and he shook his head no. We held each other’s gaze; his teeth were clenched and he made quick inhalations through the little gaps between them, his eyes squinting every time the clipper cut off another layer of nail and skin. “Run?” I mouthed to him. But his dad saw me and pointed the clippers at me. “You want some of this too, boy? Mind your business.” When he was finally finished, Tias just stood there, his eyes two vacant holes.

  “There,” his dad said. “That looks a hell of a lot more manly.” He threw a dishcloth at Tias and told him to wrap his fingers up, keep pressure on them. “Quit fucking ’round, y’hear?” he said, and went back to the couch, sat himself in that all-too-familiar ass-groove. Tias wiped up the spots of blood and bits of nail from the counter and then we both returned to his room. We unwound the cloth and looked at his hands. One nail was split wide open, cut straight down to the bed: a bloody, mushy layer that looked like an exposed brain. We sat side by side, and I rested my head on his shoulder.

  “It’s kinda cool, eh?” Tias said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, “makes you look a zombie!”

  He huffed. “He’s not my real dad, y’know?”

  “I know,” I said, patting his back.

  He cleaned his fingers very delicately in the shower, making gentle circles over the skin with soap. When he was finished, he saw me watching him, the sound of the hockey announcer on TV a muted lull beneath the roar of his father’s shouting. “What?” Tias said. I went over to him, took his hand, and stuck his finger in my mouth. The skin had hardened and felt tough on the tongue, but there were still soft spots at the nailbed.

  “The fuck?” he said and tried to shove me off, but then stopped himself, breathed in, closed his eyes, and choked back tears.

  XIX

  I book my next client, Handstandbuck, for 12:30, which is forty minutes from now. He’s this middle-aged man who works at Scotiabank. He prefers twinks, he says, and has a deep appreciation for “Native Americans.” He really admires our traditions and thinks our culture is beautiful. I text him: “Like me?” and he sends me a winky emoji. He has a wife and two kids but secretly wants to sleep with men. That’s where I come in. He’ll take his lunch at 12:30, go to the office bathroom, turn on his iPhone, and Skype with me for thirty minutes until he comes all over the bathroom stall. He’s an easy one since he doesn’t yet know what he wants; a flash of skin and some dirty talk usually gets him off. He’s a quick twenty bones.

  But forty minutes? That’s a long time to wait and I’m already feeling horny again.

  I play with my hair to make myself feel good, it reminds me of how it felt when my kokum would run her rough hands from my widow’s peak to my crown. There’s this young new-age couple who live above me and I’m not sure if it’s the banging of their washing machine or if it’s they themselves who are banging—but there are these loud frequent noises they make, like drumbeats, that remind me of my kokum. Sometimes I’ll sit against the wall to feel the vibrations and smoke a cigarette, thinking the tobacco is an offering that filters through me. My landlord says I’m not supposed to smoke in the building but I really don’t give a fuck, I think I’ve every right to destroy my body, to be ceremonial on settler land.

  An elder told me once that I could heal myself of my drinking habits if I went to a sweat lodge. He said that I’d have to wear something modest. I planned to go with my kokum, who was going to wear a long skirt adorned with ribbons that she had made. I loved it so much that I asked if she could make me one. She smiled, sent me home with a slab of bannock, and when I returned the next day, she had sewn me one just like hers. But when we arrived at the sweat lodge, the elder wouldn’t let me in. “Modesty,” he repeated, “is key.” My skirt apparently did not meet his ceremonial expectations; he told me to take it off and put on a pair of XXL Adidas shorts he had, or to return at another date in proper attire. While my kokum argued with him in Cree, I flipped him off and stormed back to the va
n. It turns out that tradition is an NDN’s saving grace, but it’s a medicine reserved only for certain members of the reservation, and not for self-ordained Injun glitter princesses like me. This tradition repeats throughout my life: I’m expected to chop wood for ceremonies rather than knead frybread, learn how to hunt with my uncles rather than knit with my aunties, perform the Fancy Feather dance when I really want to do the Jingle Dress dance. “Man up” was the mantra of my childhood and teenage years, because the dick between my legs wasn’t enough proof of ownership of NDN manhood. There are a million parts of me that don’t add up, a million parts of me that signal immodesty. When I think of masculinity, I think of femininity.

  Everything’s finished in beauty.

  I used to dream about a dress that had the colours of the medicine wheel: black, white, yellow, and red. I finally made one from some clearance clothes I found at the Sally Ann: I ripped out the stitches down to the original panels, cut out pieces from a McCall’s pattern I found at Value Village, and restitched them back into a dress that drapes over my body like a second skin. I hole-punched recycled soup can lids and sewed them to the dress instead of bells. It jingles gloriously when I dance around my living room in it. The dress is lovely and makes me feel like an NDN Sally Finkelstein.

  Since I would never have been allowed this dress on the rez, I felt rebellious in my creation of it. I had to make my own. And to really put the cherry on top, I added a “modest” slit up the leg à la Angelina Jolie.

  I am my own best medicine.