Jonny Appleseed

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Jonny Appleseed Page 15

by Joshua Whitehead


  I breathed in Tias’s scent that he had left on my pillowcases. I guess I was happy for him, Tias could make a home here in Winnipeg—him and his books. I still wasn’t sure that what I had was truly mine. All I had was this bed, this wad of bills—and these cum stains on my sheets, this pool of ectoplasm that proclaimed, “We were here.”

  XLVII

  I had this one client, tomass202, a Nate twink with an overbite whose teeth looked like shovels. He said he found my name in the bathroom stall in Peguis Central. We chatted for a month before he started asking for shows. He never asked me to dress up, just asked me to talk to him, then take off my clothes slowly, and while I did to describe my body like it was a portrait painting. “This nipple here, this the one that’s extra sensitive,” I’d tease, “and if you kiss me here, on the bits of my thigh that look like Kentucky Fried, well, you’ll just have to find out—” He was bashful, fidgety, inflamed, but coy. He wore a bandanna to conceal his face, and he kept his hair pulled back in two braids that were hidden by his baseball cap. Took me a while to get him to take off that bandanna: “You ain’t gotta hide yourself like it’s a graveyard, m’boy.” There were too few occasions where I could bedazzle boys with that euphemism; I knew it coaxed Nates like the bad magic my kokum used to tell me about.

  We corresponded in short bursts for some time. He asked me questions like I was a goddamn psychiatrist and I kept responding long enough to hear that little “ka-ching” noise of more money going into my account.

  “Wut iz it lik3?” he typed in the chat box.

  “What’s what like?” I responded into the mic.

  “Sex,” he typed. “It hurt?”

  “Nah.” I paused. “Nah, it ain’t that bad.”

  “????”

  It don’t hurt as much as the rest does, I wanted to say, but I closed the chat prematurely.

  After about a month of little chats and strip shows, we ended up finally meeting. He said he could host, as his roommates were out shopping in the city for the weekend. When I got to his place, he was only wearing boxers and a ratty wife-beater, and wasted no time dragging me to his bedroom. He shimmied out of his shorts and pulled his shirt up over his chest, and I swear I damn near saw every organ in his body, he was that skinny. I took off my clothes too, and then we laid on his bed facing each other, inspecting one another’s body.

  We jerked each other off until we got hard, then he climbed on top of me and kneaded his junk against me; he rubbed so damn hard against me that I wondered if he thought our bodies were kindling. “Slow,” I said. “Hold onto me tighter, but be patient, like you’re fishing or something.” He nodded and started to kiss me. His teeth dug into my lip like it was a flowerbed. He kept forgetting to let us breathe so I had to take in large puffs of air whenever I had the chance. I slid his hands over my hips, down to where I needed loving, but he shook his head and lay back down on the bed.

  “Can you top me?” he asked. I was taken aback. No one had ever asked me that before, but his face was so goddamn woebegone that I nodded yes. I slid myself between his legs, ran my fingers down his back. When I circled my finger around him, he gasped, and when I slowly slid my fingers inside, he squirmed like a fish on bait. He jolted and I jumped, surprised at how much I could do, but he kept nodding and said, “Keep going.” And we worked around one another like that for a while, his eyes growing large at the little world opening for him down there, and me scared of how much power he was granting me. And when I finally entered him, his whole body shook. He wrapped his legs around me like a basket. I thought, This is it? All of this is the power of man? It took the entirety of two minutes for me to spill myself over him, two minutes of prayer to Manito that I didn’t slip out and fuck up. He finished himself off, a hot sweaty mess, but his body was brown like mine in all the right spots.

  “That was, that was—”

  “It was,” I said.

  We cleaned ourselves up with a tube sock and then sat up in the bed, both of us staring out the window. The night was thick and we could hear frogs croaking out of sync with one another.

  “You want a smoke?” I asked and he nodded, probably thinking it was the thing to do after sex, annit?

  I got up and got my smokes, with the intention of stepping outside. “Hold on,” he said. “We should put something on, someone will see us.”

  “Ah for fucksakes, ain’t no one out there, it’s dark as shit.”

  I opened the door and we stepped outside naked, the wind splashing against our skin, pushing our testicles back up inside ourselves. I lit us both a smoke and passed him one. I inhaled as deep as I could, tried to burn out that authority wherever it lay deep down in me. He inhaled and coughed, trying to smoke the cigarette like a joint. I rolled my eyes. “Slow,” I said again. “You ain’t always gotta be rushing everything, m’boy.” And there that phrase was again, “m’boy,” knocking against my gut like a sledgehammer. He took a deep puff and let it out—there, I thought, now you’re getting it. The smoke slithered up into the night sky.

  “Do you think I’m sexy?” he asked.

  “I think—” I paused to take a drag. “I think you’re beautiful for a boy who lets himself feel.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him everything, didn’t have the courage to say, man, feeling like that’s going to break you if you ain’t careful.

  “It’s my first time, y’know,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “I hope I didn’t do anything wrong. Did I make any mistakes?”

  “Mistakes?” I tried hard not to laugh. “Well, let’s see, your first mistake was asking that.” Then I put my hands on his shoulders and pressed my forehead against his. “And your second one was you thinking you ever owed me a goddamn thing.”

  He nodded, took another drag. “I feel you,” he said.

  We went back inside and got dressed, his walk now a hearty swagger.

  “You staying over?” he asked.

  “Nah man, I gotta go. But this was fun.”

  “Yeah, bro, it really was. We’ll have to do it again sometime?”

  “Yeah—maybe.”

  He looked disappointed. He walked me to the door, then gave me a kiss that was more of an attempt at swallowing me whole than a light peck goodbye.

  As I opened the door to leave, he grabbed my arm. “Hey, you got any advice for for someone like me?” he asked.

  “Advice?” I paused for a minute, unable to believe any sad sucker wanted advice from me, the self-ordained NDN princess. “Um, yeah. How about this: we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.” I turned to leave, not waiting to see what his response was, because if I did, I knew I’d only see myself looking back at me. Hell, I was never good at tasting my own medicine. I walked home thinking of him and our strange date. For a minute I was convinced his was a body I could love, but I fit into him in all the wrong places. Advice? What kind of bullshit was that? Hell, you want some advice, boy? Here’s some straight from me to you: use those teeth—use ’em to dig yourself out of every ass you eat.

  XLVIII

  Peggy picked me up forty minutes late. Her hair was a bundle of auburn curls that reminded me of Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. Her van was rezzed out and dirty as all hell; I wondered, how does she even see out of this mopbucket? I handed her the money; she agreed to $250, which left me fifty to spend on a few packs of cigarettes and a handful of Twizzlers from Mac’s. We made good time leaving the city; we would be in Peguis come nightfall if we kept up this pace. Peggy drove like a bat out of hell, weaving between traffic as we sped by lakeside beaches and small towns.

  At one point, she asked, “Stop-at-Saltys-for-a-dog-er-what?”

  “Maybe next time, Peg, I gotta make that funeral, you know.”

  “Pfft-boy-you’re-slack-but-yeah-eh-okay-you’re-right-let’s-go.” She stuck out her tongue with a pop and let out a “Mlaaa.” Every time she did that, I laughed. My kokum was notorious for doing the same thing.

  I dozed off at some point, but when we pa
ssed by Narcisse, Peggy roused me awake.

  “Eh-you-think-these-here-snakes-can-crawl-up-through-our-wheels-if-we-run-them-over?”

  “Huh?”

  “You-think-these-snakes-will-curl-up-in-the-wheelwell-and-bite-our-ankles-later?”

  I just nodded because I was too tired to ask her to explain. She frowned at me and laughed to herself anyways. “You-know-like-Snakes-on-a-Plane?”

  The sun was setting as Peggy’s car lights flashed on the Welcome to Peguis sign. I couldn’t believe I was back.

  As we drove past St. Peter’s cemetery, I waved hello to my kokum.

  The entrance to the rez has always had a sign that read: “Peguis First Nation welcomes you” and lists the names of the chief and council. When I used to live there, the chief was Louis Stevenson. The last time I tried to visit the rez, there was a terrible rainstorm and the sign had fallen over. The road was washed out so we could only make it to the entrance. All I saw was a brown horse standing by itself on a small patch of land completely surrounded by water. Its belly was fat and I wondered how in the hell a horse could still be well fed and placid in a drowning world.

  I never made it back to the rez that day. The ride I was in was forced to turn around on account of the flooding and as it did, I watched the horse slowly disappear in the rear window. My eyes were locked on a white spot on his lower thigh until he became a brown blur in a blue glaze.

  Nowadays I say “holy hell” every time I think of home.

  “She-was-a-good-woman-your-kokum,” Peggy said. “I-known-her-a-long-time, always-smiling, always-happy, and-she-loved-you-like-crazy.”

  I nodded in agreement. Peggy had a pretty famous grandma on the rez too, named Evelyn. Both our grandmothers shared the sugar disease, they were both diabetic. And Evelyn, well, she loved her brown sugar. My kokum used to say that Evelyn would come over for breakfast with a pot of Cream of Wheat and a big bag of sugar. She’d warm up her cereal in the microwave and serve them both a bowl. Evelyn would top hers with even more milk and then meticulously add a layer of brown sugar. She’d wait for it to melt into a brown glaze before eating it, adding even more sugar as she made her way through the bowl. Often, my kokum told me, Evelyn would use up a good third, if not half, of the bag.

  “But I never stopped her,” my kokum said. “That cereal was hers to enjoy. Know why? Those priests, they used to only feed her Sonny Boy when she was in them schools.”

  “How-long-you-been-gone-anyways?” Peggy asked.

  “Maybe couple years now?”

  “Holy-hell-that’s-long.”

  I lost count how many times we said “holy hell” on the drive in. And I got to thinking that us NDNs say “holy hell” so damned much because we figured out how to live and love in the holy hell of apocalyptic shitstorms.

  When we finally got to my mom’s trailer, I gave Peggy a big hug and thanked her for the ride.

  “Maybe you should use some of the money I gave you to wash your car,” I said, pointing at the dust on her back windows. She laughed.

  “You-wanna-come-to-a-party-tonight-before-things-get-serious?”

  “Nah, Peg, I’m good. Be safe, okay?”

  She nodded, then put her car in reverse and drove back down the gravel highway. I knew she’d spend most, if not all, of that money on booze tonight. Hell, she’d probably end up stranded here too. I started to feel bad for bringing her back. As I walked up to my mom’s door, there were two cars rusting in the yard, tire rims scattered on the porch along with kid’s toys, dog food, and empties.

  I was back, and the whole damn rez looked, felt, even smelled the same. All my cousins were still here, for the most part. Maybe Nates stay on the rez because they’ve been pushed so far already. But wherever we end up, we can take pride in knowing that we can survive where no one else can, and that we can make a home out of the smallest of places, and still be able to come home and say, “I love you, Mom.”

  I knocked on Momma’s front door thinking about her, wondering if she was a lightning-struck tree like me, all rare and beauteous in our pain. I hoped she would give me that slap upside the head, reel me into her weathered arms, and speak to me in that old-fashioned Cree, kisâkihitin, m’boy, kisâkihitin, and tell me stories of how we’ve lived, and loved, and grown.

  XLIX

  She thought I wasn’t coming.

  When my mom opened her front door, she took hold of my whole body and lifted me off the ground in a huge bear hug. Her grip had gotten stronger since I’d last seen her. Her hair was in a messy ponytail and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, but her face looked exactly as I remembered it: hard and aged, but kind.

  “You missed the wake,” she said.

  “I know, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t have the cash to return sooner, you know, shit, that old rez money don’t reach that far off the rez. But I’m here now, right? Solid as a rock.”

  “We still have so much left to do. We have to help Mabel make the dainties for the service, I still have to pick up the flowers for Roger, and I still have no idea what the fuck I’m going to wear—”

  I grabbed her and hugged her tightly again.

  “I’ll help you with all of that,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Babe, heck, I just missed you.”

  We held each other like that for a while, then she made us tea and ripped us a slab of bannock, which we sloppily slathered with butter and jam.

  “I was in hell,” she said in between bites. “Straight up hell, Jon.” I wanted to say me too, tell her ain’t nothing straight about hell, but instead I sliced another piece of bannock in two. “He ain’t ever tell me it got that bad, fucking asshole,” she said. I used my fork to pull the tub of margarine towards me, slid my knife into it. “Who the hell does that? Who in their right mind peaces out leaving their nicîmos like that? Fucking dumb-ass, he’d go out with all those cousins of his, day in, day out; wake up, sip, get dressed, sip, go out, sip, come home, sleep—repeated that shit every day.” I didn’t say anything, just kept spreading the margarine hard across the two bannock halves, spilling crumbs everywhere. “I know I ain’t no saint, Jon, I know I been friends with that old bottle too damn long too—but, I only ever do it to whittle time, at least that’s what I told myself.” I spread the raspberry puree on the bannock next, that dark red jam oozing into the newly formed crevices. “And each time he’d come back I’d see how time etched into him, his muscles became sandbags. His calves were thin enough for me to wrap my fucking hand around. And his whole body went yellow as piss.” I took a bite from one half of the bannock and slid the other half across to her. “He looked like a goddamned skeleton, Jon, my old man was walking around dead as a doornail.” She shook her head, pushed the bannock aside.

  “And he tells me, Karen, ain’t nothing no hospitals gonna do, fuck, I go there with strep throat and they ask me, ‘You drunk, boy?’ Ain’t nothing they gonna do, ain’t no one gonna give a liver to an NDN whose already punched out.” Momma’s curls fell across her face, hiding her, but her eyes peeked through, making her look feral, wounded, sad as a fox stuck in a hunter’s trap. “Said to me, ‘Karen, it’s my time—ain’t nothing wrong with that,’ and I said to him, ‘You don’t get to sit there and talk to me about wrongdoing, you, the one who let time fuck him up the ass royally—you don’t get to sit there and look at me with that pitiful face looking like you the only NDN who ever been hurt.’” My dear momma, I wanted to say, when did you become an owl caged in on all sides? “Ain’t fucking fair, Jon, ain’t fucking fair at all.”

  Her body caved in on itself, but the veins in her arms rose up and showed the royal blue blood that beat and beat and beat inside her. “He never let me call no one, saying it ain’t my business, telling me this his fight, that he know a thing or two about scrapping with death.” I got up and wrapped my arms around her from behind. “And when he went I lost me, Jon, I lost me real good. Feels like I ain’t got nobody left—why everyone gotta leave me here to rot in this fucking hellhole, Jon?” />
  “You got me,” I said. “And I’m not ever leaving, Momma.” I rested my chin on her shoulder and we both stared into the distant corner of our kitchen. “Remember when you told me that neither of us weren’t ever supposed to survive birth?” I said. She nodded and grasped my arm. “You told me, ‘Jon, you, your Momma, we ain’t the lie down and die type, we’re survivors. That c-section or that pneumonia ain’t take me and it sure as hell couldn’t take you. The doctors said we had a week max and then come two, three, a month, a year, and then now, and you sure as hell better believe tomorrow.’ You remember that, Momma? You told me, ‘Never forget you born of Grandmother Earth, boy, you, the one who made me crave mud all the while I was pregnant with you.’ And I picture you sometimes, Momma, sitting out there in the bush, dress soiled, all that dirt painting your fingers black, and you there, hair in a glorious braid running down your back, digging your hands into that dark, brown flesh. Then you scoop out the guts of the earth and you swallow ceremoniously, that mud slopping down your mouth and chest. And you smiling, Momma, you happy as all hell there in the bush, with your belly full of kokum askiy. And I picture that earth wrapping itself around our umbilical cord, Kokum there kissing us in the bathwater of your womb.”

  Momma laid her head on the table and broke down, dissolving into a yelping cry. I pressed myself against her and cried into her hair.

  “I remember, m’boy,” she said. “I told you when you left that we hardened ourselves to the world back then, that old Grandmother Earth gifted us a shell by wrapping around the braid that maintains us. We both born from a wound.”

  We held each other for what seemed a lifetime after that. We were so fucking helpless in our nostalgia, both so heavy with our sadness. When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.

 

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