Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

  When I got home and excitedly told my kokum what had happened, she laughed and patted me on the arm, and my mom reacted in much the same fashion. But Roger, overhearing our excitement, unbuckled his belt, pulled it out of its loops, and doubled it over in his hands like a bullwhip. He grabbed me by the back of my shirt collar, bent me over the table, pulled down my underwear, and gave me one hell of a lickin while my kokum and mom yelled for him to stop.

  “Boys don’t”—smack—“dance with”—smack—“boys”—smack.

  The sound of his leather belt slapping against the bare skin of my ass crackled throughout the house. I imagined the rez dogs in the front yard lowering their ears, hiding in the long grass, and whimpering. My flesh reddened and began to split. Roger had broken the skin and I could feel a tiny dabble of blood trickling between my cheeks.

  When his arms got tired, he commanded that I “get out of his sight.” I ran to my bedroom, locked the door, and inspected the marks on my bottom in the mirror. They were tender and throbbing. It hurt, but I had to admit, a part of me was excited too.

  I took off my pants and lay on the carpet on my stomach. I rested the cool side of my pillow on my ass. That’s when I discovered the sensations my body could produce. I dragged my pelvis across the carpet and learned how good I could make myself feel by rubbing my lump of flesh.

  Not only was that my first encounter with Roger’s mean streak, but it was also the awakening of my queer body. The trickle of blood, the splitting of skin, the pain on my ass cheeks, the full-body pleasure of an ejaculation—I felt as new as those rare trees split wide open after a storm, all tender and wondrously ravaged.

  XLIII

  I have a deep-set belly button that everyone made fun of when I was a kid. I was a chubby boy and whenever we went swimming, I always hesitated to take off my shirt. When I did, my aunties would tell me to run slowly towards them along the rapids. “You’re like on Baywatch,” they’d yell, pointing to the jiggle of my stomach fat. But it was my belly button that entertained them the most. It must have been an inch deep. My uncles would take their flashlights to inspect my belly’s flesh-cavern and yell, “Helllllooooo!” I always wondered, were they looking for a baby in there?

  When we had swimming lessons at school, I asked Roger to write me a note to excuse me from P.E. When I told him I was afraid to swim, he sat me on his lap.

  “What’s bugging you?”

  I told him of the shame I felt when I was naked; how the other boys would whip me with their towels and poke at my fatty rolls. And they were drawn to my freak belly button too—the large, gaping hole that wobbled like a grape inside those gross old jello salads. Roger balled my hand into a fist and raised it to the hollow between his eyes.

  “You see this spot right here?” he said. “Whenever someone’s bugging you, well, you hit them right here and they’ll go straight down. And if they don’t, their eyes will be tearing up so much that you can swing another hit or two and finish ’em off.”

  Roger had a way of thinking he was the NDN Rocky Balboa—he was always offering brawling techniques to others. I’ve seen him fight a few times; he had a goofy yet terrifying look to him when he was angry. He was known as “Sucker Punch Smiley” by his friends because whenever he was sizing up a would-be opponent, he would smile at them. And it would always catch his enemies off guard—while they were trying to figure out his demeanor, Roger would sucker punch them with an uppercut to the chin. It worked every time. And since Roger had such a large clan of cousins on the rez, no one ever tried to jump in for fear of his family’s retaliation. He was smart in that regard. He may not have been a world-class boxer, but boy, for a scrawny, 150-pound NDN, he had no problems taking down a man twice his size.

  Roger lifted up his shirt and pointed to the large ash-coloured scar that ran horizontally across his waist. “See this?” he said. “Here’s where I had my kidney removed a few years back.” And then he pointed to three little scars that formed a triangle on his abdomen: one between his ribcage, one on his right side, and one in his belly button. “See this one? Had my gallbladder removed, too.” There were stories for each of the scars on his body—some from surgeries, some from sicknesses, some from scrapping—stories that I’ve heard him rehash a million times. He had survived cancer, a few overdoses, and had even been stabbed before—but he was still trucking along. At least he was then.

  It was the scar inside his belly button that always caught my attention. One time he let me touch the raised ridge of skin. “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “The gallstones? Fuck, yeah. But the wound? Nah. Not anymore.”

  Roger always let me explore his body to appease my own anxieties. His was like a graveyard of injuries and ailments, so alive with experiences, while mine was just riddled with shame. Roger knew the fun my aunties liked to make at my body’s expense. And when he sensed that I was worried about my appearance, he’d tell me the story of the belly button that his mother told him before she passed on.

  Roger is a Lakota, unlike my mother, who is Cree, so his stories always differed from ours. But I liked what he had to tell us. When he had his gallbladder removed as a kid, his mother told him the importance of his belly button. His people call it the chik’sa and revere it as a sacred body part.

  “The chik’sa,” Roger said, “is a very important part of our spirituality. They say that the belly button is where the spirits live. You see, when we’re born, our moms would take our belly button and place it inside of a turtle shell and then wrap both of those in a buckskin satchel. And they’d safeguard it for their baby until they were old enough to have it. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because the turtle always returns to his birthplace. So, when my mom put my belly button inside of the turtle shell, she was combining us spiritually—you know? It was so that I’d always know how to come home if I ever got lost or left.”

  “And did you?”

  “Nah—too busy on the warpath,” he said, laughing.

  A few years after Roger told me that story, I got a wood tick in my belly button. Heck, I didn’t know it was a wood tick right away and I’m not sure how long it had been in there fattening up with blood, but when I stuck my fingers inside, I felt it squirming around. It didn’t feel rough or patchy like a wood tick usually does; it was slick, cool, and moist to the touch. In fact, if I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it felt like a watermelon seed. And for an entire week I let it live there, cradling my stomach at night thinking that Manito had gifted me with a watermelon baby to carry and care for.

  When I was convinced that it was growing, I told my mom and Roger as they were watching contestants on The Price Is Right spin the wheel.

  “Guys, I’m having a baby!” I yelled.

  They looked perplexed until I lifted up my shirt and showed them the fat, black seed that had filled my belly button. My mother screamed and Roger ran to the kitchen to grab a pair of tweezers. My mom slapped me upside the head and said, “Boy, you’re something, you know? That’s a damned wood tick, for godsakes.”

  Roger carefully inserted the tweezers inside and clasped them tightly on the tick. It hurt us both—I could feel the parts of my belly button where my skin had begun to fuse with the tick; my innards felt like a slick, wet olive. Roger then bore down on the tweezers and finally yanked the tick from my belly. I gasped in pain and grasped the couch as blood shot out from the hole, oozed down my navel, and soaked into my underwear. Roger stood over me with the tweezers, the tick still squirming. Afterwards he took that wood tick and held it in his ashtray, then poured salt on it and burned it with his ashes. It died violently, to say the least.

  And that’s sometimes the strangest thing about pain, that sites of trauma, when dressed after the gash, can become sites of pleasure. Sometimes when he’s getting me off, Tias will probe that gaping hole with his forefinger, swab it like a Q-Tip, little excavating NDN always wanting inside of me. And when he has me teetering on that blue-balled edg
e, I ask myself when I’m about to come just where it is that I’m going?

  XLIV

  My body was sore from the webcam sessions. I was laying back on my bed and smoking a cigarette, fingering the edges of my belly button. My Snapchat piggy bank said I had $260, and combined with the forty I had left from Mumbaiboy and the funds I made the other day, I had about $420 in total. That would be enough to top up my rent and get my ass to the rez. I figured I’d give ol’ Peggy a call and see if she’d run me to the rez for $300; maybe I could even swindle her into giving me a cheaper price.

  I had one more day to get there. I figured if I left early enough tomorrow, I could get there by late afternoon. There was enough time, I thought, as I stared up at my stucco ceiling that looked like bat droppings. I opened the blinds and saw that it was dark outside. The streets of Winnipeg were alit with fluorescents, and the Exchange was quiet save for a few rowdy gangbangers I could see hustling in the alleys. There was a line of taxis waiting for fares along Princess Street. Part of me wanted to celebrate, to yell at someone down on the street to come up and toke with me, but no one was around; even my pigeon neighbour was fast asleep in his nest of bones.

  I opened my phone and saw that it was 11:27 p.m. Tias had messaged me a couple times. I texted him back: “Hey you want to come over?” I knew I only had to wait maybe twenty minutes, ten if he had cab money or his bike, for him to show up at my door—but only in NDN time. And what was a few minutes more for that inevitable break-up talk? Sometimes I feel like I should have been born a Cormac, always hitting the road and telling myself, “You can’t stop what’s coming.”

  When Tias arrived, he was wearing a band tee and dirty jeans; his breath smelled of Budweiser and his eyes were beginning to glaze over. His lips were crusted with tobacco and roach crumbs. But he flashed the boyish smile that I had come to adore. “Listen, Jonny,” he said as he stepped inside and grabbed my arm to look into my eyes. His other hand held onto one of the empty loops of an eight-pack of Bud. I couldn’t concentrate, looking down at his boxers peeking out from his jeans.

  “Jonny, I need to tell you—”

  I grabbed him by the waist, took a beer, and motioned for him to sit down. He closed the door behind him and plopped himself down on the couch. I ripped open the can of Bud and felt the cold sensation of it sliding down my throat as I shotgunned the entire beer in front of him.

  “Slow down, Vac,” he said, laughing. He patted the seat beside him and unhooked another beer. He passed it to me as I sat down.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  His lips quivered as if he were bench-pressing too large a weight. And he could lift his weight and then some—I’ve seen him do it. We used to say we were going to get jacked like the NDN boys we saw on television, like Taylor Lautner or Booboo Stewart.

  “You see—”

  We’d pick up dumbbells, his in the high twenties and mine in the low teens, and curl them in front of each other. Our veins rose and plumped thick as tree roots. He always teased me for needing a spotter. Sure, I was weak—what do you expect of me? I’d say. My arms are thin as roots and I usually only use them to swatch glosses and liquid lipsticks. But when I did lift that bar on my own, which was only once, Tias cheered and slapped me on my thigh, which made me instantly get hard. I was always full of tricks.

  “You know, Jordan and me—”

  Tias had a ravenous hunger for sex; he had a lot of fucked-up problems, but god, his body, in pain, turned me on to no end. He suffered so delightfully—and then again, maybe I did too. We fucked right there in his foster family’s basement. We hid ourselves by making a fort from old towels held up against the edges of his water heater and dryer. He pushed his tongue so deep down into my throat that it felt more like a dental extraction than love-making, all chase, all coming.

  “Jonny, are you even listening?”

  He used to hurt me a lot back then, when I didn’t know how to let him inside me without clenching my bottom so tightly that his flesh tore into mine. Our bodies were made of cells that were braided together, and particles of blood, semen, and shit that leaked and oozed out from us—bits of discharge that were both living and dying.

  “I got her pregnant, Jon.” He paused, staring me in the eye. “She’s pregnant, Jonny, and I don’t know what to do.” And then he collapsed in on himself like a piece of plastic burning in a bonfire.

  I vacuumed the beer I had in my hand and cracked another.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  XLV

  When I first moved to Winnipeg, Tias never shamed me for leaving Peguis, never called me a traitor, an apple, or a fraud for abandoning my people back home. Heck, I think he was even a little proud of me for leaving; my kokum had just died, and the rez didn’t feel like a home anymore. I stayed in bed and slept all day, every day, save for the few times I got up to take a piss or roll a joint. My body was a dead zone. My kokum had always told me that sleep was not a waste of time, that it was a time for healing, so I slept long and hard, waiting for my blood to leech out its memories and for my body to rejuvenate.

  In those first few days after I moved to Winnipeg, Tias stuck by me after driving me down there; he took care of me as he helped me settle into my first place in the North End. He set up all my furniture and shooed me away when I tried to help. He wasn’t much of a chef but he did keep me fed. He cooked the only food he knew how to make: perogies. I watched him scurry around in the kitchen from the mattress on my floor. He rolled out the dough, cut it into circles with a plastic cup, peeled and boiled potatoes he got from the food bank down the street, and mashed it all together with cheese strings and onion soup mix. Then he delicately poured a spoonful of filling into each circle of dough, folded it over, and pinched it closed with his fingers. They were odd little perogies, all different sizes, and some burst open in the boil—but they sure tasted good. “I’m not sure how a little Nate like me got good at making perogies,” he said.

  We ate those perogies every day during my first few weeks in Winnipeg. They reminded me of home and my dear departed kokum, though I knew my world was about to change.

  XLVI

  Tias stayed the night. When I woke up, I decided not to tell him that I was headed back to the rez. The sun was rising and beating down through my blinds. I traced his body with my forefinger as he lay sleeping: from his chest that slowly rose and fell, to the bottom of his rib cage, to the round rise of his hips. I put my ear to his navel, half expecting to hear something, before slipping my tongue inside, wanting to taste Nanaboozho’s elixir. Tias woke up and looked down at me.

  Without a word we took each other in our mouths, ending with a final plume of cum that slid between our pressed bodies. We didn’t bother wiping ourselves, just laid on our backs, his hand in mine, both of us staring at the ceiling and breathing in the hay-scented air.

  “We’re going to keep it, Jon.”

  I pressed my thumb into the ball of his hand. I wanted to feel the ridges on his palm, see if his lines were still broken like mine. Where mine were cracked and frayed, his made an “M” shape that took up his entire hand. I brought his hand to my face and I could still smell the beer and cigarettes.

  “I’ve been working on finishing my grade twelve, you know, bettering myself and shit.”

  I curled my body around his left side, and his arm pulled me in closer.

  “And you haven’t been around all that much lately, you know?”

  I could feel my phone vibrating beneath the pillow. I pulled it out and saw the yellow glow from a new client—Manito, I prayed, give me the strength not to check my Snapchat right now.

  “Did you hear what I said? We’re going to keep the baby.”

  I nodded into his armpit and pulled him in tighter. I inhaled his stink and then licked him—I wanted to taste him, consume him, remember him. We wrapped our arms and legs around each other, our heads burrowed into the other’s neck like an ouroboros, as tears started streaking down our faces. We used to love holding each
other like this—we even made our own verb to describe it: burritoing. “Want to burrito?” he’d ask, and we’d link together and fall asleep that way.

  “The world breaks everyone,” Tias whispered into my ear. “And after, well, heck, those that make it through are strong at the broken places.” He ran his fingers through my hair and lightly grazed my neck with his lips. “Hemingway,” he said with pride. “I have to read him for my GED. You should read him sometime.”

  I nodded and pushed my head against the curve of his fingers.

  “I’m gonna finish and get myself straight, Jon. You know, learn a trade or something, for the baby and Jordan and shit.”

  He kissed my forehead and got out of the bed. The sun was rising higher in the sky, heading toward noon.

  “I guess this is goodbye, eh?” he asked, putting on his shirt.

  “You mean ekosi?”

  “I mean, you don’t say!” he laughed.

  I smiled and nodded. My pigeon friend was stirring outside my window, flapping its wings awake. Someone was pushing a shopping cart down the back alley, its rickety wheels scraping the pavement.

  “Kihtwâm?” he asked.

  “Ekosi,” I replied.

  He unlatched the door and looked back at me. His eyes were full of regret—there, I thought, there’s the Tias I know. When I tried to kiss him one last time, he turned his head. My lips met the brisk hairs on his neck.

  “The rain won’t make any difference,” I said.

  “What?” he said, looking confused, but I closed the door without responding. When I heard his footsteps disappear down the hallway, I went back to bed and checked my phone. I ignored the client requests and saw that Peggy said yes, she’d be here at noon. It was ten o’clock now so I had two hours to pack. But all I wanted to do was stay between these sheets and forget.