We each had to prepare a Swedish dish. “I’ll make Swedish meatballs,” Brooke announced. “I’ve had authentic ones before, you know, when my mom took me to IKEA.”
Brooke then decided who would make what.
“Carol, you’ll make gingersnap cookies. Tammy, can you do crêpes? And—”
Before she could finish, I interrupted her. “I can make rice pudding, my mom makes it all the time!”
It was true—my mom did make the best rice pudding. She’d make it for me as a reward whenever I came home with good news, like the time I had won our monthly spelling bee competition. I used to practise in my room at night to learn how to spell. I flicked my tongue at the harsh “T” in trade and puckered my lips into a kiss to lull out the “O” in goat. There were all kinds of strange words that I knew how to spell then, like P-e-r-c-o-c-e-t and i-n-s-u-l-i-n.
My mom made her rice pudding with wild rice and smoothed it out with fresh milk. Then she added vanilla and cinnamon to it, which made it soft brown in colour. Raisins were next, and I liked to watch them fatten up in the froth of milk and cinnamon.
I also liked to help with the stirring. “Constant movement,” she used to tell me, “helps to blend all of the flavours together and thicken the liquid. If you keep the rice and the raisins moving, they’ll really fill up with milk.” So I kept on stirring that pot. Which was hard; my biceps weren’t half the size of my mom’s—heck, mine were more the thickness of a hind’s feet.
Whenever I complained that my arms were getting sore, my mom would take over. “Boy, you’re slack,” she’d say, and playfully slug me on the shoulder. To celebrate the day I finished high school, she made an entire soup pot full of rice pudding. As she stirred it with one arm, she pulled me in close with the other. She held me like that for what seemed like forever. I could feel her deep breaths on my hair, which sounded almost animal-like, but her touch was soft, and she rubbed the top of my head with her chin.
“Heck, I’m just proud of you m’boy,” she said.
“Thanks Mom,” I said. She didn’t say that very often.
That night, all of our neighbours and family came to visit. My mom had cooked enough rice pudding for the entire rez. She ladled out bowl after bowl of pudding for the elders and kids who lined up first, and then again for everyone else. Some of my aunties brought bannock, and another had hamburger soup. My uncles brought moose meat burgers and grilled them up, and my kokum served her jello cake. Almost everyone I knew had come and were dressed up to some degree, which meant blue jeans instead of sweatpants. Someone brought a fiddle and played music. My mom and Roger danced on the grass outside, and my kokum swayed along with my younger cousins. We ate our feast and held each other into the wee hours of the night, until we couldn’t see each other in the thickness of the dark.
Brooke had insisted that I bring Swedish rice pudding to Culturama, but when I showed up with mom’s version instead, she gasped and shook her head. “Nonononono,” she said. “This isn’t Swedish rice pudding—why are there raisins in this? Why is it all brown? No, Jonny, you messed this up. We’re all going to get an F because of you!”
I came home crying that night. “That’s just the way it is,” my mom said as she consoled me. That was the only answer she had whenever there was a problem. When I showed her the folder containing all the research we had done, she was really impressed. “Heck, they eat reindeer? Maybe we have more in common than I thought,” she said. When she flipped to the last page, which was about the Swedish tradition of blood pudding, she started laughing, which echoed throughout our house. “Here, m’boy, I have just the thing,” she said, and got up.
She pulled out all the frozen cherries she had in the freezer, and every packet of red Kool-Aid she could find, then threw them all into a pot along with some homemade raspberry jam and ketchup. When it came to a boil, she mushed the mixture until it was smooth and poured it all into a big plastic bowl.
“Here, you take this tomorrow instead,” she said.
“The heck is this?”
“You tell them that if it’s tradition they want, then this here is as close as it gets.”
When I brought it to class the next day, everyone in our group gasped. “Here,” I said to Brooke, “it’s blood pudding, like the one we wrote about.” I scooped a spoonful of the thick, maroon-coloured paste and held it near her lips. “Try it,” I said, “it’s a delicacy in Sweden.” When she put the spoon into her mouth, she promptly spit it out all over our table. The map of Sweden that we had coloured was stained with cherries and ketchup.
“This tastes like shit!” she screamed. Our teacher immediately stormed over and handed us both pink slips to see the principal. Brooke’s tongue and lips were stained red; I laughed as she pawed at her mouth. “It’s not just red,” I told her, “It’s NDN red.” I wondered if that was what Sissy Spacek felt like when she torched her high school gymnasium—it was my Carrie moment.
Both Brooke and I were suspended for the remainder of the week. When I got home and told my mom, I thought she was going to give me a good spanking, but instead she smiled and high-fived me.
I wished with everything I had that the food colouring would stain Brooke’s mouth forever, because redness was their lord’s way of chastising you.
XXXVIII
By the time I left Tias’s place, the sun was bright and beating down—the heat caused my sweat to intermingle with Tias’s lovestink. I lit a cigarette to mask the smell. When I turned on my phone, I saw that I had nine requests for a web-show. Hell, I thought, I could top out my funds to get home in a few hours at this rate.
I wondered how my mom was doing.
Someone named MumbaiBoy messaged me asking for a private show. I typed in a kissy emoji and then an angel emoji to reel him in. Every customer wants to think he’s taking your purity—that his dick is the first to penetrate and populate your canals. But if you’re smart, you can play that against him and earn yourself a few extra bucks. You need to show that you’re a tease but also virginal; that you’re loveable but also fuckable. These men are all too easy; they’re all a bit voyeur and a bit voyageur. They don’t want to play doctor with you so much as they want to be the Jacques Cartier of your hipbones.
“Give me twenty?”
“Down to meet?” Mumbaiboy replied.
“For a fifty, yeah.”
“Meet me at The Forks.”
When I met up with him, he was older than I thought, maybe in his early thirties. His hair and eyebrows were a rich, dark brown and his skin was as dark as mine. His hair was disheveled from the wind blowing in from the Red River. He had deep-set laugh lines and faint crow’s feet—for this reason, I figured he was trustworthy. On the rez and in Winnipeg, there was this rivalry between the Indians and us NDNs. Hell, most Nates I knew loved most East Asians; we loved their stories, loved their horoscopes, loved their tea and herbs—but an Asian with a bit of brown was a little competitive, setting up a West Side Story kind of turf war. At a house party once, this Filipino boy told us they used pig’s blood to boil meat and all the Nates there called it “nasty”; some of them even jeered that it was “right savage.” But I always thought, hell, we’re not that different, eh? I’ve eaten the guts of deer and elk before. “Traditional,” they’d say, like ceremony was a one-way street.
Mumbaiboy bought us both a round of PBR’s at Muddy Waters smokehouse. One of the waiters was trade and I had to avoid making eye contact because he’d been a resource I’d tapped a little too often. But avoiding him was easy when you’re two brown boys wearing T-shirts two sizes too small.
“I always had a thing for Indians,” Mumbaiboy told me.
I bit my lip. “Yeah, me too,” I said in my best Marilyn Monroe voice, even though I don’t think either of us knew who we were talking about, at least I didn’t.
Afterwards he took me to his apartment, which was down St. James. He said he broke up recently with his girlfriend and that he’s been experimenting with boys on hookup apps ever
since. He told me his real name, Aric, but I still called him Mumbaiboy.
His apartment was quaint, I guess you’d say. There was no TV. Large black bookshelves filled his living room; all types of books lined his walls: Hemingway, Poe, and interestingly, John Richardson. I remembered reading his book Wacousta back in the day. As Mumbaiboy gave me a quick tour, he glossed over his library, telling me that I wouldn’t be interested in those boring books, which I found a bit insulting. Then he led me to the bedroom and slowly stripped me of my clothes. He kept his jeans on and left his button-down shirt open, and I could see his nipples harden in the air-conditioned room.
I knelt down in front of him and took hold of his hips. I looked up at him. His eyes were dark and sullen, but they were soft and pleading too. His look was so melancholy that it made me want to cradle him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and he ran his hands through my hair. I sandwiched his leg between my thighs. In my experience, I’ve found that if you make holes in your body by curling your fingers or contouring your limbs into a shape that’s fuckable, a man will always try to fill it.
I could feel his penis harden beneath his jeans.
And just like that something in him awakened too. He pulled me to my feet, threw me on his bed, yanked down his jeans, and fucked me right then and there. I pretended he was Tias. I wondered if I was making love to all the books that lined his shelves; I wondered, if I fuck him back, will my cock puncture the fontanelle of the larger men he’s loved and consumed like Hemingway and John Richardson? I wondered, which of us is the real Indian?
He lasted maybe five minutes. When his warm cum pooled between my thighs, I felt him release every morsel of breath that he’d been holding in. It sounded more like the noise a television makes when your cable company cuts you off than it did a man.
His eyes refocused on me. “I thought you’d be skinnier,” he said. I bit my lip and nodded, then grabbed my fifty and left. How fucked up, I thought. I may not have the best body but I do have a body—and it’s a body that deserves to be touched and loved and owned, annit?
XXXIX
When we camped out in Hecla, Tias’s parents did not let us out of their sight because of our beach night shenanigans. Funny how easy we were to entertain those days; Tias’s parents blew up a beach ball and the four of us played “Keep Up” on the gravel road for hours. Whoever was the one to drop the ball had to sit out and the winner got a Starburst candy—save for Tias’s dad, who got to take another swig of his beer.
The sun beat down on us as it rose to the top of the sky; the heat became dense. Our skin clung to our cotton t-shirts and sweat pooled in our pits and on the curvature of our spines. My momma said I got that from my daddy—his propensity for sweat. It always embarrassed me. Any bit of heat and I’d be wetter than an otter. All the kids used to make fun of me in school for it: “Jonny, did you just jump out of the pool?” School was excellent practise in learning how to tell stories to finagle myself out of embarrassing situations: “Naw, I wet my hair in the water fountain to keep it looking slick.” Sometimes they’d buy it, but the maps my body etched out on my shirts told another story. I still do that, hell, when white people ask where I’m from I can never bring myself to say Peguis or Winnipeg—it doesn’t sound exotic enough, doesn’t make me seem like I’m more than the sum of my NDN cells. Sometimes I’ll say Toronto or Montreal because I’ve heard those are places where classy people come from. But I’d always pray to Manito that they wouldn’t be like, “Oh, whereabouts? I’m from there too” because then I’d really be in deep shit. The only French I ever learned was from watching Moulin Rouge whenever it was on TV and I saved that sexy talk for the bedroom: “Hey, Tias? Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”
The last time I heard fancy French was when Jordan won a big-ass pot at bingo and took the two of us out to this right nice dinner at the Fort Garry with all these francophone waiters. Tias was back on the rez at the time, and Jordan couldn’t bear to be alone, hell, any NDN with a pot that big would never celebrate solo. Everyone said that the Fort Garry was haunted, but there was no scaring an NDN as traditional as Jordan—I was sure she carried sweet grass and an abalone bowl in her purse wherever she went.
“Order whatever you want,” she said as we looked at the menu. She was wearing Levi’s and a Friendship Centre T-shirt, and I was wearing a pair of blue jeans and an Adidas sweater. I had thought I looked fancy, but I looked around and everyone was wearing a shirt and tie or an expensive-looking dress. I would catch people stealing glances at us, probably wondering what the hell the two of us were doing there. I threw my coat on over top of my sweater, which at least was leather.
“Don’t let these môniyâw intimidate you, Jon, fuck ’em,” Jordan said.
“I’m not embarrassed, hell, I’m just cold, okay? Lay off.” Part of me wanted to tell her I was sorry for lashing out at her instead of them, but I didn’t. Jordan had it figured out, though. Whenever someone looked at her, she gave them the evil eye. She hated to be stared at, took it as a sign of disrespect, and responded with an invitation to fight. No one really dared stare at us after that.
Our waiter was a real sexy white man, the kind you hide from your momma after a land claims debate and a secret snag. I ordered pork confit, which I somehow knew how to pronounce, and Jordan ordered a bison tenderloin, along with a $75 bottle of wine. The menu said, “From the land” and I thought to myself, “Yeah right, honey.” It reminded me of what we used to eat on the rez: rabbit stew, elk burgers, deer steaks, carrots and onions straight out of the ground, homemade berry jam, Saskatoon pies—the first few weeks after I left the rez, I kept throwing up from all the cheap-ass food I bought from Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
When our food came, Jordan and I looked at each other with a puzzled look—the fuck was this? My pork was so small it looked like there were only four bites’ worth, and Jordan’s bison was so rare it looked like it was cut straight from the goddamn living animal—did the chef think we were that savage? And forty dollars a plate for this? A hardcore rip-off, if you ask me.
We soon realized we couldn’t be white suburban classy. I hated the meal, I wished we were at Neechi Commons instead, but I ate it all save for licking the plate because my kokum told me never to waste good food. We did get dessert with our meal, which was nice; I got a lemon strawberry cake and was super excited to have something I finally liked. But the goddamn thing was the size of a toonie, and I ate it in one bite—the hell, I thought, this is basically the amount of food we put out as an offering to the spirits at a smudge.
“You wanna just dine and dash this bitch?” Jordan asked, eyeing up the joint. I nodded, this meal wasn’t worth no damn two bills.
“Okay, I’ll stuff my coat into my purse and go for a smoke break,” she said. “You wait a minute or two, then go to the bathroom, it’s right beside the entrance. Then when you’re coming back out, just leave and meet me around back.”
“What if they stop me?”
“Say you’re coming to get me, easy as pie.”
As Jordan got up to leave, I slid my wallet back into my pocket. I started to feel a bit guilty for screwing our cute waiter, but I thought, You know what? fuck it, and wrote “Hit me up sometime, cutie” on a napkin alongside my Snapchat handle and a winky face for him to see. When I ran out the door, Jordan was there, and we took off, both wine drunk, running back down Broadway towards The Forks. The smell of the Red was strong tonight—a pungent scent of fish and diesel, the harsh screech of the CPR, the flash of graffiti gang signs. We had both lived out our Pretty Woman fantasy that night—but she was the one who was a little more Richard Gere, me a little more Julia Roberts.
Jordan invited me back to her place, so we hopped on the bus on Main Street and headed for the North End. Once there, we downed a few beers.
“Ah fuck it. Wanna just crash here tonight?” she asked.
I didn’t feel like stumbling back to the Exchange this late at night—all those bro-dudes thinking they’re hot shit e
ating at the ol’ Poutinerie and listening to some shaggy-headed band playing Journey on the second floor of the Kings Head, and me having to make my way through the crowds of drunk Nates wearing ratty coats ripped in the pits.
“Yeah, for sure,” I said.
So we logged in to her neighbour’s wifi and watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno on her VOD. And I guess the wine and beer kicked in, one thing led to another, and we started making out on the couch. Her tongue tasted like cigarettes and Budweiser and her mouth was warm as bathwater. Her arms slid down my back, lifted my shirt up, her fingers feeling the raised scar at the back of my neck. Her nails were sharp as she dug them into my shoulders. Her mouth met my neck and she suckled it like a hungry calf. I moved my hands over her curves from her shoulders down to her breasts, to the sharp indent of her waist.
I slid off her jeans, then her underwear. I kissed my way down to her vagina, her body like a ravine with berry bushes around its perimeter, a cedar trail guiding me to the mound. The folds of skin confused me, but I did as I was taught by the Fishermen boys—counted with my tongue, peyak, niso, nisto, spelled out words like nimis, pîkiskâci, miwâsin. As she moaned I thought of Tias, of how I hadn’t seen him naked in a while, of the way his musk always led me to his penis. I discovered how Jordan’s body sang with mine, like finding something I had lost.
But as we made stories with each other’s bodies, I got a nosebleed. I didn’t notice it at first, but when I saw it I panicked—the terrifying sight of seeing my Cree leak out of me, a reminder that “You can die here too.” I scrambled from her body’s grasp, my face a stained map. For a brief moment we stared at each other, each of our faces distorted with a look of shock that mimicked the other. We both became aware of what we were doing at the same time.
Jonny Appleseed Page 12