Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  “Sorry, Tias,” I said after a few moments of silence. “Shit’s rough. But hey, you still got this little guy.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “little guy’s the toughest sonuva I’ve ever met. Been through hell and back and he’s still here. He’s a fucking mess.” He laughed. “But every mess on his body has a funny story behind it.”

  I climbed into bed beside him, nuzzled my head between his armpit and pectoral. He wasn’t wearing deodorant, but I kind of liked his stink, it was one of his sexiest attributes. I laid my left arm and leg over his body and he rested his chin on my forehead.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “You gotta tell me sometime—”

  “Little by little,” he interjected. “Little. By. Little.”

  As we began to feel sleepy, I thought about the Dickens book he was reading. He was right, I didn’t care for it but that doesn’t mean I hadn’t read it. I think Ebenezer and I had a lot in common: we both liked money and to screw. And weren’t we both haunted by ghosts?

  “Tell me one?” I whispered to Tias.

  “Okay,” he yawned, “but I don’t know where to begin.”

  “To begin with,” I suggested.

  “Yeah?”

  “You got an ass laden with wood.”

  “Ekosi,” he laughed.

  “You don’t say,” I replied, in between kisses knitted with girlish laughter.

  XXVIII

  I never cried when my kokum died—I reserved my energy for telling stories and making everybody around me laugh. My voice, my body, my life—every piece of me is a bundle of medicine that gives and burns and smudges. When she died, she was wearing a blue and white hospital gown with pale blue diamonds patterned on it. I had watched those diamonds rise and fall with every one of her breaths for twelve hours straight as she lay unconscious in a hospital bed, until they finally stopped. I was alone with her when she died; only her and me at three in the morning. When her bloated belly stopped filling with breath, I rubbed it and felt it gurgle. My kokum taught me long ago when my aunty died, that we need to rub the breath out of the belly of the dead.

  “It’s to help them on their way,” she said. “That’s what us women do—we help them on their way back home.”

  So I rubbed my grandma’s belly and put my ear to her mouth. Then I crawled onto the bed beside her and laid my head on her breast. I maneuvered one of her arms around me and the other hand atop my head. My favourite feeling in the world was when she clawed my hair with her fingers to put me to sleep. Her hand fit perfectly on my head like a bird sitting atop a ledge. We lay like this for a bit—I didn’t tell the nurse she had stopped breathing and because we had unhooked her from the machines, they didn’t know she had died. I slipped her monitor off her finger and pressed it onto mine. I wanted a few minutes like this, just us.

  The nurses were busybodies, I could hear them scurrying about in rooms adjacent to ours. They were telling jokes and laughing. Their happiness pissed me off. Stop fucking laughing, I thought, my kokum’s lying here dead. I drowned them out with a prayer. I told Manito I love him still. I told the ghosts that permeated our room that maybe I’m ready too, you know? Maybe I’m ready to go; itsokayitsokayitsokay. I laid there not moving, trying desperately to sleep, trying my hardest to will myself into death. I closed my eyes and said here it comes, it’s coming, it’s here. And when I could open them again, I wondered what was wrong with me; why not now? Wasn’t the lifeline in my palm broken too?

  When a nurse eventually came into the room and discovered that my kokum had passed, she asked me if I was okay. By then the tears had already crusted in the corner of my eyes. “Of course,” I replied. I didn’t tell her that I thought something inside me was dead too; didn’t tell her that something inside me had been broken for years, if not centuries.

  She wrote up a report and closed my kokum’s eyes, then walked out of the room and summoned a doctor. In the room beside us, another nurse was still laughing.

  Sometimes I don’t like how life goes on.

  And sometimes I don’t think it should.

  XXVIX

  My head is the most sensual area on my body. When someone runs their hands through my hair and gently applies pressure on my temples, I can fall asleep on a dime. My mom and kokum used to put me to sleep this way when I was a kid; they’d run their fingers like a rake from the top of my forehead down to the nape of my neck.

  After my kokum died, I spent a lot of time alone. It was Tias who got me through the whole ordeal. He came over every day and talked with me. If I was in bed he’d sit on top of the sheets beside me. Hell, he even sat beside me while I wallowed in the tub. And I don’t even remember what it was we talked about, except that sometimes he’d tell me stories of his foster dad as if he were some benevolent white christ figure. But the way he told stories was so sincere that I couldn’t help but become enamoured. That was when I learned just how much power there is in stories—they can transform an alcoholic, child-beating sonuva into a saintly man who loves and gives annually to Unicef. I don’t know what it was that Tias loved about that man, but he loved him nonetheless. I had to respect him for that.

  He’d often ask about my dad and I’d never have much of a reply except for the automated response I’d memorized, the “I was two years old and he died in a rez fire, it was real tragic” spiel. Truth is, I never knew my father. When he died in the fire a few years after he left us, Mom said he was messing around with some slooze named Pauline because he couldn’t handle being a dad. I wondered if she blamed me for taking away the great love of her life. She told me about how great of a pow wow dancer he was. He used to wear red and black ribbons and was the highlight of every Men’s Traditional Dance on the pow wow trail. Mom said he moved like a brutish bison, and how his muscles would glisten in the afternoon sun. That, and I overheard her once saying that he was hung like a bull too. I guess that trait skipped a generation.

  I have a few photos of him that I found in my kokum’s photo album. I used to think they were photos of me because the two of us look the same save for my dad’s ability to grow facial hair. Me, on the other hand, I can only grow pathetic little patches here and there.

  My kokum had two photos of my dad that are now mine. I showed them to Tias.

  In one of them, he’s in the middle of the bush, smiling at the camera. He’s wearing these grey khaki shorts, and his legs are bare and thin. His hands are pressed against his bare belly. There are gaps between his upper teeth, making him look a little like Madonna. I run my tongue along the same teeth in my mouth and feel the same gaps. That’s me, I think. Someone has superimposed my face onto the body of some boy in the ’60s. But his body has no baby fat whereas my boy-body was plump. I guess those genetics jumped a generation too.

  In the second photo, my dad is a teenager, and his hair is jet black and shaggy, curly at the tips. Looking at the photo, you would swear he was Latin, in fact, he looks exactly like Cheech Marin. He’s sitting in the hallway of what looks like his school, his long, lanky legs spread wide apart, one extended and the other bent into an ‘A.’ There is a German shepherd nuzzling its head against his shoulder. My dad’s arms are wrapped around the dog; he cradles it with such affection, you’d think it was his kid. I think the photo explains my childhood propensities for running around on all fours like a dog. Hell, maybe it even explains my love for doggy-style.

  Tias was the first person I ever showed these photos to. He smiles and nods whenever I tell him what I think of my father. Talking of men pleases him. On one such occasion, I was in the tub, and he played with my hair through the whole ordeal. I was half asleep when he asked if I wanted to go shoot some hoops. I shook my head and sank deeper into the bath.

  “You need to stop feeling so sorry for yourself,” Tias said as he left the bathroom. I heard his distorted voice from beneath the surface. When I heard his footsteps pounding down the stairs, I blew bubbles in the water. I wanted to tell Tias that if I don’t feel me—well, then no one ever would.

/>   XXX

  When I awoke, Tias was gone. The smell of fried bologna and burnt toast wafted into the room. I rolled over onto the other side of the bed. His pillow smelled of his sweat and musk. I pressed my face against it and imagined my cheeks brushing against his fine chest hairs. I got hard. My fingers had memorized the musculature of his body—I could feel the cool prick of his hard nipple against my forearm. When I licked the back of my teeth, I could taste his tongue.

  It was when I raised my face from the pillow that I saw the photo. Tucked neatly into the corner of Tias’s mirror was a photo of him kissing Jordan Blackhorse—the girl I’d come to love-hate. She was tall and beautiful, with long black hair and sultry, bedroom eyes. She was an intimidating soul wrapped up in a dainty frame; as cute as she looked, she was tough as nails—hell, one time she’d even given Logan a black eye when he called her a cheap slut. She was also blessed with the motherlode of all names. I abhorred her tenacity throughout school because of it; I always wondered if having a boy’s name made for a boy’s mind. That, and everyone knew she was NDN without having to ask. See, you know you’re a legit Nate when your surname combines a colour with an animal. She used to say that her NDN name was Tatanka, and everyone was always impressed at her soliloquies spoken in her Saulteaux tongue. I later learned that Tatanka meant buffalo in Lakota. My kokum taught me that one night while we were watching wrestling.

  “Blackhorse? That family is a bunch of looneys, m’boy,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “I want to be like Jordan,” I said. “I love her NDN name.”

  “And what is it? Great Black Angry Bear?” she roared over Steve Austin screaming on TV.

  “Tatanka.”

  “Tatanka?” She laughed. “Tatanka? She’s nothing but stories and lies, m’boy. That tongue of hers, it’s a smoke screen—them Blackhorses, they’re known for their tongues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for starters,” she proudly announced, “the girl’s Saulteaux and speaking Lakota. Tatanka means buffalo in Lakota. Rule number one, if you want to be an NDN, you might want to do your research first.”

  I giggled and flung my feet into the air. My kokum caught them with her hands and placed them on her lap. Her hands were wrinkled but firm as she pressed her thumbs squarely into the balls of my feet and squeezed upwards towards my toes. Press, pull, slide, and release. She used to do this to me when I was a baby and later as a young boy. She’d pull my breath and sadness and jealousy and rage from me and expunge it through my feet.

  “The feet hold in them all sorts of mysteries,” she said softly. “Our footprints, they carry with them all sorts of stories. You can burn my prints, cut my hair, salt my tongue, but these stories are etched into the hides of our soles. And yours,” she continued, “yours are arched like a crescent, like a moon. You’re not flatfooted like me. Heck, boy, your feet tell the story of opaskwuwipizun.”

  “The opa-what?”

  “Your feet are the story of when ducks begin to molt—the full moon in July.”

  Jordan’s picture was still staring at me in Tias’s bed. Being watched like that, I felt ashamed in my nakedness. I covered my junk with Tias’s blanket and stared up at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking of her and Tias holding each other, of how her body fit his more honestly than mine. I got up, got dressed, and pocketed the photo.

  Upstairs, I could hear the sound of forks scraping against plates. Tias didn’t invite me up to join him and his family for breakfast—he was hiding me in his basement bedroom like a rat. I wondered if Jordan had been here too. Had he invited her upstairs for breakfast? I knew he liked her. Did this mean they were snagging? Is this what he liked? I pulled the photo from my pocket and studied it. I could be that, I thought. From here on out I’ll charge an extra buck per hour. My repertoire was growing with new roles I could perform. My mind was becoming a funhouse of femininity. I stuck the photo back onto Tias’s mirror and headed toward the window to leave.

  When he fucks me, I wondered, does he think, “I wish my woman was here?” Or is it the other way around—when he fucks her, does he think of me?

  XXXI

  Once I left the rez, I made a small circle of friends—some of them were once my clients or Grindr hook-ups, others were Nates who had left the rez too. Most of us were sad-looking kids wearing hand-me-downs and Sally Ann; we had a propensity for drinking too much and dancing too fiercely. I ended up becoming better friends with Jordan after she moved to Winnipeg, even if she was sleeping with Tias—I mean, we hung out once in a while on the rez because we had to, limited space, y’know? Even more limited when it came to sharing the same boy too, but us NDNs know a few things about trading resources. She was the baddest of the crew because she was a neechi from Bloodvein. All she had to say was that she was from Bloodvein and then no one would fuck with her. Everyone knew that Blood Nates were ferocious and that the women were tough as wolverines. She was one of those real traditional Nates who always scared me—the kind whose gait looked like a jingle dance and whose arms were thick as logs because her daddy taught her how to trap. Her mom died giving birth to her and Jordan used that story to scare people off. “I’ve killed someone before, y’know,” she’d say while pushing up her sleeves. “What chance do you think a punk like you has?” She was scary as fuck and I took to her like a magnet knowing full well the protection she could offer. That was how I survived the rez, annit? Making friends with the toughest NDN women I could find because everyone knows that Nate girls are tougher than the men. Sometimes they’d fight at parties, the girls and the boys, and while the boys would sometimes win, the girls would attack like vicious packs of wolves and they never forgot a grudge. An eye for an eye was their motto. If you pissed them off, if you looked at them the wrong way, if you stole one of their men—they’d all remember and they’d come back at you when you were least expecting it. In this way, they had miraculous memories—hell, we all struggled to memorize BEDMAS and the periodic table, but boy let me tell you, if you ever crossed one of them, they’d remember it until they got their revenge. Better to fess up and take your beating, cuz it ain’t healthy to live with that kind of fear residing in you.

  Jordan and I only became real friends when she finally found out that I had been sexting her man—prior, I think she kind of knew, since she always kept an eye on me in the hallways and in the smoking pit. She gave me a damn good lickin, that’s for sure, but afterwards, when she felt my debt had been paid, she helped me up and said, “So, you wanna get lunch, ’er what?” She took me down to the McDonald’s on Portage. Portage was the street where all the Nates hung out, aside from the North End—you didn’t have to worry about looking fancy or talking straight down there because everyone talked the same; so long as you weren’t white, you could make it around pretty safely. Lots of Filipinos down there too, but we got along pretty well—we all fished for catfish in the Red and tried to look out for one another at house parties.

  Inside McDonald’s, she pulled out a giant book of coupons she was carrying around in her backpack. “Work smart,” she said, “not hard.” Half those coupons were old as shit but she knew where to take them, the right fast-food joints and grocery stores—places where she could either befriend or intimidate the other brown-skins. At the counter she marched right up to the cashier, this young Nate kid, slapped down her coupon, and said, “Two Big Macs and large fries, cuz—and don’t forget, it’s two-for-one.” Her coupon had expired but the boy rang her through anyway—maybe out of respect, maybe out of fear. Fuck, she scared the shit out of me, but as we sat down she flashed me a goofy smile. “For fucksakes, boy, you can sure take a heck of a beating,” she said, laughing, and handed me a wet wipe from her pocket to clean up the blood and snot that had apparently dried around my nostrils.

  As we talked, Jordan would continue to burst into fits of laughter, stopping only long enough to punch me in the arm. She always did that—make her laugh, you got a beating; piss her off, you got a beating, there w
as no walking away without a bruise from her.

  With her, I was convinced that having a boy’s name could certainly make for a boy’s mind.

  XXXII

  Tias stood behind me and his brown hands were around mine, our fingers interlaced like a woven basket. We held our cigarettes in this way, then flicked the wheel on our lighter, waiting for the spark to catch. Schht, schht, schht—we struck the lighter’s stone for what seemed like minutes, trying to will the flame to burst through. Schht, schht, schht.

  “Ah, fuck this,” Tias said. “I’ll just go start the goddamn element, do it the old-fashioned way, eh?”

  We decided to try and quit smoking cold turkey after a few weeks of me hacking up phlegm all night. “It’s white,” he said, scooping up the spittle from my chin. “That’s good, your body is tryna clean you out.” We thought it was a good idea to quit smoking for a while, since, well, we didn’t have a lot of money between us, and besides, we could bum enough off the kids at parties if we needed. No use buying cigarettes when you can get them for free from your cousins, eh? But while that idea sounded good in theory, it quickly backfired on us. After only one day, we decided we couldn’t do it. We came to the understanding that quitting cold turkey wasn’t going to work for us; it had to be slow, easy, one day at a time. So on our second day we agreed to allow ourselves one cigarette, and only in the mornings. After we had our single smoke, we saved two for the following day, then cut up the rest and threw them into the garbage. But when I went to take my shower and realized I forgot my towel, I came out of the bathroom and found Tias fashioning a broken cigarette back together using the tape from a lint roller.

  “Okay, so two a day then?” I said.

  We stuck to two that day and chewed a lot of gum instead. We felt proud of ourselves. Tias, unable to stay the night, asked if I’d walk him home so I could make sure he didn’t bum or buy any cigarettes. I agreed and saw him as far as the Marlborough where he hopped on a bus. He waved goodbye and I smiled at him. It was getting dark and the wind was cold and my nipples were sticking up through my shirt. By now I’d usually light a cigarette to warm my bones and count how many I’d need to get back home, usually one every block or two. I began walking back to my apartment, but the urge crept up my body, from my kneecaps to my fingers, which were aching to curl around a filter, like the delicate digits of Audrey Hepburn.