The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama

by Daniel David Moses

  Y: Naomi?

  N: No.

  Y: David?

  David shakes his head.

  DM: Our friend Jake lived hard. He died as well as he could. God, we’re only human. He was a good friend, a good artist, a good man. He loved life. He hated dying. Don’t hold it against him, okay?

  DM holds her hand out over the water and opens it.

  D: Very Catholic.

  DM shrugs.

  D: Hey buddy. (opens his hand)

  Yvette holds hand to sky, then over the water.

  They look at Naomi.

  Naomi nods. Opens her hand. David puts his arm around her. The other two stand on either side of them, looking at the water.

  Three

  David, DM, and Naomi are walking with, variously, a picnic basket, a cooler, a beach bag.

  D: At least no one is going to freak out here.

  DM: Why’s that?

  D: ’Cause they’re island people. They’re already freaky.

  N: They are not freaky.

  DM: Hey, I’m island people.

  D: Not Toronto island people. (beat) What island?

  DM: Grenada. Do we get cell coverage over here?

  N: Ha ha

  D: I didn’t know that. I thought you were from here. Like, Toronto born and bred.

  DM: Nope.

  D: Wow. Grenada, eh? Operation Urgent Fury?

  DM: Vikings.

  D: Ah.

  DM: Where is she taking us?

  N: To the right place.

  DM: Why can’t this be the right place? It’s got everything. Sand. Shore. Ducks. Those are ducks, right?

  N: Ducks.

  D: She’s doing her faithful Indian guide thing.

  DM: It all looks the same to me. Why isn’t this spot?

  Yvette walks back on. She too carries a basket.

  Y: This is good, I think.

  DM: See? I knew this was the right place. Blankets?

  Y: Yup.

  From the bags appear blankets, a tablecloth, and food in Tupperware. They talk as they spread out the feast.

  N: Thanks for doing this. All of you.

  D: S’nothing.

  N: It’s a lot. Taking the time to clear your schedules. Trekking around the city with me. All this.

  DM: Good reason to play hooky.

  N: I didn’t know – who to ask – really. Seems like such a weird – quest.

  DM: Everything – about death – is weird, isn’t it? You so rarely do it, if you’re lucky, so when you have to do it… (beat) It was good of Jake to leave us such clear directions.

  N: Writing the script, choosing the locations, directing us. Even in death.

  D: Look at this spread. Chicken, salmon, potato salad, beans, berries—

  He reaches to take something from a container, DM smacks his hand.

  DM: Uh uh. Feast. Gotta wait.

  D: Oh. (beat) For what?

  DM shrugs, motions to Yvette.

  Yvette is collecting a little bit from every container, putting it on a plate.

  Y: Plate for the spirits. For Jake.

  D: Okay.

  Y: Okay. Naomi?

  Naomi shakes her head.

  Y: David.

  D: I don’t know how to pray. I don’t know what I believe in. I don’t have any spiritual – thing.

  Y: You don’t have to pray. You can just speak.

  D: (beat) I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  Jake was one of my first and best teachers. And here he is four months dead, and still teaching me. I have lived in this city all my life, but today, Jake is showing it to me anew. We live on a lake. We live on a lake.

  I learned a lot from Jake. About art, about words, about passion. I didn’t learn a lot from him too, though he tried to teach me. About generosity, and humility, and compassion. I know I’m not supposed to say I wish he was here, but I do. I wish he was still here showing me stuff. I would be a better student.

  They wait.

  D: Sorry. That’s it.

  N: That was good.

  DM: Eat?

  Y: Eat.

  DM hands them plates.

  D: I’m not hungry.

  Y: It’s a feast. You have to eat.

  D: Okay.

  Y: Come on, it’s my famous roast chicken.

  D: The one with the lemons and sundried tomatoes and things—

  Y: Yup.

  DM: (piling food on her plate) Yum yum potatoes, yum yum beans.

  Y: It’s a feast for Jake, Naomi. We are feasting Jake.

  N: I know. Okay, okay.

  She begins to put food on her plate.

  Four

  Later that night. There has been a fire, but now it is embers. DM has a mickey of whiskey. She cracks it and pours a bit on the ground, takes a sip, passes it to Naomi.

  DM: So what are you gonna do with the rest?

  N: Not sure.

  D: You could make him into a diamond.

  N: What?

  D: Sure, there’s this company in the States that will turn the ashes of your loved one into a diamond.

  N: You’re making this up.

  D: Nope.

  DM: Where do you get this stuff?

  D: It’s everywhere. On the net, on the television. I’m a playwright. I am a student of the human heart. (beat) What?

  DM: Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re quoting one of your poets or if that’s actually you speaking.

  Y: Wow. I guess people just need to do something – to memorialise – to mark the loving in some way – but that just seems so – wrongheaded – would you wear it?

  D: I guess that’s the idea.

  Y: Seems like the opposite of what we are supposed to do – grieve – mourn – move on – live in the moment – how do you do that with your loved one there around your neck every day?

  DM: Or on your finger – like an engagement ring, stay away stay away, I am spoken for, I am taken.

  N: So the diamond idea is no.

  DM: No.

  D: Definitely no.

  Y: Yeah, no.

  N: Well, I guess that leaves eating him.

  DM: Eeeyeww

  D: Thanks, I am full of feast food.

  Y: I’m down with that – DM? Down with? Up with?

  DM: Down with, jeeze.

  D: You would? You’d eat him?

  Y: Sure. Made sense to me in Heinlein.

  DM: What’s Heinlein?

  D: You don’t grok Heinlein?

  N: Well, we’ve done concrete, water, sand.

  Y: Earth, air, water—

  D: I thought it was earth wind and fire.

  DM: Do you remember the 21st night of September?

  Love was changing the minds of pretenders

  While chasing the clouds away

  C’mon David, ba de ya de ya de ya

  D: Wow, you know Earth, Wind and Fire?

  DM: Of course. C’mon, ba de ya de ya de ya

  Y: But not Heinlein.

  N: Please don’t make David sing.

  Y: You can’t make David sing. Or dance.

  N: Or quit smoking.

  D: Whoa, are we going back to pick on David? Not that I mind? I’d just like to know, so that I can gird my loins.

  DM: Gird your loins? Oooh (hitting head) get out! Get out!

  Y: You know, you don’t have to decide right this instant.

  N: Well, I sort of do. He said I would know. St James at noon, the ferry to the island, the island, and then I would know what to do with the rest. Well, here we are. I’ve done my best, followed instructions, and here we are. Now what? Now the fuck what?!

  Silence from the rest.

  N: I don’t know what to do next. I feel – like all this time – these months – I have just been going forward because that’s what Jake expects, he expects me to go on, to keep working, to keep moving. It’s wha
t everyone expects, what’d you say? grieve – mourn – move on. And I didn’t want to grieve too much, too publicly, because—. We die, right? We live, we die, our friends do some rituals, some ceremonies, and life goes on for the rest. To grieve too much or too long is – unseemly. Especially for someone who cared less for his life than I did.

  Y: Naomi—

  N: He smoked ‘til he got lung cancer, which probably only beat cirrhosis by a few years, and then he didn’t even have the guts to stick it out ‘til the end. He didn’t have the guts to fight, he didn’t have the desire to stay with me – to stay a few more weeks or months—

  I guess I should be grateful he took pills and didn’t blow his brains out.

  I am not grateful. I am angry. I am angry and I am abandoned.

  Nobody knows me the way he knows me. Knew me. I feel unknown now. No one will ever know me like that again.

  I feel like something is breaking up in here (she touches her chest), actually breaking—

  DM and Y go to her, touching her.

  David stands apart. He goes to light a cigarette, then doesn’t.

  D: This is the hour of lead

  Remembered if outlived,

  As freezing persons recollect the snow—

  First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

  N: Yeah. Yeah.

  Y: See? That’s why we brought David, he always has the right quotation.

  D: Your own personal Bartlett’s.

  DM: I can hardly wait to see what he writes from this.

  D: Uh uh, pressure.

  DM: We have to give you a deadline, or else you’ll never write – it. Whatever it is. What is it?

  Y: A poem.

  D: No, I’m a terrible poet. That’s why I memorise so many. Trying to figure out how they do it.

  N: A piece for Geist?

  Y: Bless you.

  N: Scattering Jake.

  DM: A play?

  D: Maybe a play. Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

  N: Can you write it better?

  D: I’ll try, Naomi.

  N: Okay.

  D: Okay.

  N: (looking at her watch) We should get going, if we want to get the next ferry.

  Y: Okay.

  DM: Okay.

  They start to pack up. David holds the ashes box.

  D: Um, what do you want to do with—

  N: Oh, put it back in your purse.

  D: It’s a man-bag.

  DM: (pointing at Yvette) Don’t even think of going there.

  Yvette shrugs.

  N: I don’t have to decide right now.

  DM: (kicking at the fire) You think this is out enough?

  Y: Oh yeah, it’s fine.

  They pick up the bags and basket and cooler.

  N: Oh this is much lighter.

  D: That’s because I ate an entire chicken and a pound of potato salad.

  DM: Oh yeah, this is way better.

  Y: Come on, people. We don’t want to miss the ferry.

  As they exit.

  DM: Hey, David. Can I play me? In the play?

  D: Sure I guess.

  N: I don’t wanna play me.

  D: Okay.

  N: Okay.

  The End

  Richard Van Camp

  Love Walked In

  The horror show began the exact second I told the truth. This was right after Janette came to town. Single Mom. Body of a stripper.

  Kevin was like, “Check out the yummy mummy.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I always thought women with short hair could only ever be cute. I was wrong. She’s white, French. She even sparkled in French. Just listening to her in the Northern line-up warmed The Hammer nicely. The prized ivory of a white woman has put me in the worst kind of heat. Then Wendy’s masturbation incident happened, and I lost everything around me.

  I saw Janette that aft getting out of her car as I cruised down Candy Lane in my Dad’s old truck. She saw me. She was playing hopscotch with her girl and smiled as I drove by for the fiftieth time down her street. God Bless Candy Lane. She stopped to pick something up, and it was the way she bent over that got me. Her shorts were so tight they cupped her ass and I could see her pubic mound. I had to keep on driving, pull over by the airport, turn off and empty myself in gushes onto the high grass. I came squadrons.

  The school was still closed until they found a new principal, and this was my life: Jonathan hated me. Nobody waved back; the girls I grew up with ignored me. Fuck them all.

  Donna kept calling. She wanted me so badly. She had been cute but that was about it. She had let her hair grow, and that sharpened the curves of her cheeks. Her eyes had gotten darker over the years, like her Mom’s, and she was still sort of pretty. And she had those tits. Her ass was a little fat and she was short. I couldn’t get her legs over my shoulders if I tried. Funny how she fazed me with those words outside the cafe after the showdown with Jon – “You’re a hero” – ’cause I was anything but...

  Janette, for some reason, had chosen Doug the Slug Stevens as her bull. I couldn’t believe this. The Slug raped his fourteen-year-old babysitter years back. That’s how he lost his kids. How the Slug got Janette was beyond me, but I was gonna sink his fuckin’ boat just like I sunk the principal’s.

  Donna was knocking on my window last night at two. Her folks were Cree and let her run wild, I guess, whenever and wherever she wanted. She did three taps, waited and did three more. I waited until she left and stroked one off for Janette.

  In the morning, Mom brought me a CD as I was combing out the back stoop of my mullet. Jonathan and I grew them on purpose because we were holdouts for the ’80s.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “You tell me,” she said. It was a CD case: Samantha Fox’s Touch Me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well somebody left it for someone here, and I know it wasn’t intended for me – and it better not be for your father.”

  I opened it up and saw that Donna had written her name on the inside sleeve. “I must have dropped it last night.”

  Mom looked at me, stared at me actually. Her eyebrows rose, then lowered. She swept the back of her hand with her palm and this was a move she used to make when she still smoked. She was nervous. “We need you to clear out that brush in the backyard. Snow’s coming soon and it’ll block the skidoos.”

  I figured we were back to business. For a while there, I knew my folks were worried about me. After the social worker came and the RCMP took my statement, I wouldn’t leave the house. No one called. The weight of my own clothes on my body made me feel like an old man, and it felt like someone was doing a handstand on my shoulders, pushing me down. I worked out twice a day in the basement, stayed in my room for hours just listening to Van Halen, The Cult, The Outfield. All I did was read Playboy and try to plan my future sex life: sex with Janette, break her heart, then move on, find someone younger for sex in an elevator, the Mile High club, sex in the bathtub, sex in the shower, sex outside, sex in the rain, sex in the snow, sex out at the cabin, sex on the trapline!

  These days, the only someone who calls is Donna, but at least I’m out and about. The one good thing that happened – and the only reason I’m out and about – is I got a call from Mr. Henderson aka Boss Hog over at Northern Lights Log Homes.

  “I heard what you did,” he said. I could hear chainsaws in the background. “I need a log peeler who’s willing to work hard before the snow comes. After that, we’ll see if we can train you on the crane. The money’s okay. I can’t compete with government, but you’ll at least learn how to build your own log home. What do you think?”

  Mom and Dad were watching me, and I knew Dad had put the word out that I needed an arrow of light to fly my way.

  “Sure,” I shrugged. “Why not?”

  So I worked all day, peeling logs for Boss
Hog. The last thing I wanted to do on coffee break or lunch was ask questions or try to learn about building log homes. The first two days I forgot to bring gloves and shredded my forearms peeling the spruce and pine. After a while I didn’t feel it much anymore when the bark bit me. The good news was I was doing push-ups and pull-ups when the boss wasn’t around and I got tanned at the same time. To my surprise, that Samantha Fox CD was pretty good. I put it on low and got to work. To my even bigger surprise, Janette drove by in the government truck. I pinched my helmet a few times through my pockets so The Hammer’d swell as she drove by.

  I stood up and smiled. I had my shirt off and was sweating something fierce. She smiled back when I flexed the pecs and even turned her head to look directly at me when she came by the second time on her way home from work. Nice.

  I ran behind the biggest log pile and jacked off in jets to blast a web of fury and hysteria all over the logs behind the woodpile outside the work site. I surprised myself with how great it felt to come, the relief of it all, but the force and burn didn’t fade. It just got better and better. I got quite the tool here that’ll last me for life and lead me through a field of women.

  Later, at coffee break, I walked into the office.

  “Who’s Donna?” Boss Hog asked as he looked up.

  “A friend,” I said, putting my gloves and hatchet away. “Why?”

  “Tell her to quit calling here,” he said. “She’s called twice today.”

  “You got it,” I said, and blushed in front of the guys.

  He paused before getting into his big-ass Duelly. “She wants you to meet her for fries and a Coke after work.”

  Harold, Boss Hog’s oldest son, grinned. “How ’bout fries and a cock after work?” The crew howled like wolves and I looked away. Goddamn him. Fuck he had a big buffalo head. Why didn’t he get his front teeth replaced?

  And goddamn that Donna...

  “Don’t call me at work anymore,” I said on the phone.

  “I want to see you,” she said.

  I was drip-drying from the shower. The tan was coming along good. I was trimming my muff with Dad’s moustache scissors. I wanted to have the perfect V, like what I saw in Mom’s Playgirl. “Not a good idea,” I said.

  “Remember when we used to go out?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Bye.”