Hungry Ghosts

by Peggy Blair

  “It’s okay,” the boy said. He suddenly sounded weary. Pike decided to ease the boy into the interview.

  “Just tell me what you saw.”

  Pike let the silence run until the boy finally spoke. That was the Anishnabe way, giving someone time to think, not pressing them with questions. That was the hardest thing about the south for Pike, the way people interrupted each other constantly. He was already starting to feel the rhythm of the reserve, the way silence filled empty space. Although it wasn’t completely quiet. In the background, the computer chirped as more Loonies escaped.

  “She was lying down, under some branches,” the boy said. “I moved them so I could see if she was all right. I thought maybe she was sleeping at first. But she wasn’t breathing. So I ran home to get my uncle and tell him.”

  “That was a good idea, Pauley. How long after you found her did you do that?”

  “I dunno. A few minutes, I guess.”

  “Did you see anybody around, any cars or anything?”

  The boy shook his head, avoiding Pike’s eyes. “No.”

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “Just the branches.”

  “Did you have a smoke while you were in the woods?” Pike asked. “Maybe a roll-your-own?”

  The boy shook his head. Pike looked at the boy’s fingers. There were no nicotine stains, no smell of smoke.

  “We found one near the body,” Pike said. “Did you see it when you were there?”

  The boy frowned, twisting his hands repeatedly. “I didn’t see anything on the ground except some footprints. I think they were the lady’s.”

  “How did you know she was there, Pauley? How did you find her, under all those branches?”

  The boy shrugged. “The crows told me where to look. They thought she was my mother.” He shifted in his seat, his fingers fluttering. “They can tell our faces apart, but they can’t describe us very good.”

  “I see,” Pike said slowly, trying not to smile. “So they’d have trouble picking someone out of a police lineup.”

  “No,” the boy said, seriously. “They can’t do that. They felt bad she was the wrong colour. They can’t see colours like we do. We’re all just ‘not-crow’ to them.”

  “You mean because she was white?”

  The boy looked puzzled. “No. Because she was blue.”

  Pike shook his head. “What do you mean, blue, Pauley? Blue like when your fingers get really cold, that kind of blue?”

  “No. Blue like this.” The boy motioned to the computer screen, his hand-fluttering more agitated.

  A knock on the door and Freda Wabigoon came in holding a cracked mug of steaming hot tea. “Your plate is in the kitchen, Charlie. Pauley, you ready for some lunch?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” said Pike. “Miigwetch.”

  Freda closed the door.

  “Can you tell me what you saw again?”

  But the boy didn’t answer. It was like he had gone away in his head somewhere, thought Pike. Maybe he was scared of something. Of him? Of Freda? Pike waited for several minutes before he finally gave up.

  “Well, thanks for talking to me, Pauley. If you think of anything else, you let me know, okay? I’m going to give you a card with my number on it. My cell phone doesn’t work all that great up here, but I should be able to get emails. You know how to do that, right? My email address is on that card.”

  Pike stood up and put his card next to the computer. The only sound in the room when he left was the whirr of the computer, and the small bips of copheads and Loonies as Pauley ran them over.

  Charlie Pike drove up the road to Manomin Bay First Nation Seniors Centre. He put the old man’s beaded cuff on his wrist where he might have worn a watch, and turned it nervously. He inhaled deeply and forced himself to get out of the SUV. He walked to the front of the building and opened the heavy door.

  “I’m here to see my auntie,” he said to the woman at the desk. “Alma Wagamese.”

  “She’s in the craft room, down the hall.”

  The old woman was sitting in a wheelchair, knitting. “Well, now, is that my little Charlie?” she said, grinning widely. She took his hand and patted it. “It is you, isn’t it? My, my, I’m glad to see you. I heard you were visiting the reserve. I thought I might die without ever seeing you again. Look at you! How tall you are.”

  Pike pulled over a chair. “You look good too.”

  She patted his hand again, smiling. “See here? I’ve been knitting. Making little socks for the babies.” She showed him a pile of tiny wool socks. “In the old days, I’d make them moccasins, but my fingers are too stiff and my eyes are too old. Don’t need to see well to knit, anyway. Your hands do it all by themselves, you just point them in the right direction, and they know what to do.”

  She held up the knitting. Precise rows of stitches, fine detailed work.

  He remembered when she made quill boxes. She’d wait until the spring, when the bark peeled in sheets from the birch trees, then cut out the round circles that formed the bottoms and tops of the boxes. She’d skin a porcupine and remove the quills and dye them, making stew from the carcass, using the fur for hats and mitts. Then she’d line the quills up, piercing the shell of each box with intricate designs, and weave sweetgrass around the tops so the boxes smelled fresh and pure and clean.

  It took her a whole week to make a single quill box. When he was a child, she was lucky to get a few dollars for one.

  “They’re really nice.”

  “Miigwetch. You been to see your dad yet? He’d have liked it where they buried him, looking out over the water. We missed you at the service all those years ago.”

  Pike shook his head. When his father died, he was still in Winnipeg, stuck in remand with Sheldon Waubasking. Then he heard his family had been evicted. Kicked out of the only home Charlie had ever known.

  “I didn’t think I was allowed to come here anymore.”

  “Oh Charlie. I’m sorry about what happened. It wasn’t your mother’s fault, you know. Back then, if an Indian woman married a white man, she lost her Indian status and so did her children.”

  “She divorced him before we were born.”

  “I know that, Charlie, but he was white, so the law said she was white too. My brother—your dad—wanted to marry her, but he was Catholic and she was divorced. Under our laws, they were married, though, your mom and Ralph. They had a traditional ceremony with elders, and a big feast. I remember, I was there. But Indian Affairs never did recognize our customs. That’s why they took her off the list, and you boys too. As far as the government was concerned, all of you were white. If it wasn’t in a church, it wasn’t a wedding.”

  “Chesley had a choice,” said Pike. “It wasn’t fair, throwing us off the reserve.”

  “Chesley had a lot of people waiting for housing. Once your dad died, he had the Indian agent to deal with. And don’t forget your mom is a Mohawk. Lot of people up here have never forgotten the old wars.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, Charlie. But now they have Bill C-31, you can apply to be an Indian again, get your status back. Your mother can too. How is she doing?”

  “She died two years ago.”

  “Oh, my,” said Alma. “I’m sorry, Charlie. I didn’t know.”

  Pike took a deep breath. “I tried to get her buried at Six Nations, because that’s where she was from, and the Mohawk band council said I couldn’t if she wasn’t an Indian anymore. She had no legal right to be buried in their cemetery.”

  Now his mother wandered, Pike believed, severed from everything important to her. But her soul had been stripped from her bones long before the cancer took her, when Canadian bureaucrats had decided a full-blooded Mohawk woman was white because of the race of a man she’d once married.

  “I talked to the clan mothers at Oka
. That’s where her mother was born. They said the band councils don’t represent the Haudenosaunee, only white man’s laws. They told me I could put her ashes in The Pines, where the Haudenosaunee used to bury their dead. That’s where she is now.”

  “Your mom deserved better, Charlie. But then, we all did,” Alma said, shaking her head. “I still don’t have a will and I’m eighty-four years old. Because I’d have to give a copy to Indian Affairs for the minister to approve, and I don’t think it’s the minister’s business what I do with my few little things. And what about you, Charlie? Are you going to apply to get your status back?”

  “Where I work, it doesn’t matter,” said Pike stiffly. “They all think I’m an apple anyway. Red on the outside. White on the inside.”

  “I’m so sorry, Charlie.”

  Pike nodded uncomfortably. He toyed with the beaded bracelet on his wrist and changed the subject. “I wanted to ask you, did you ever know a family named Manajiwin up this way? There were three brothers. The oldest one is in his late sixties, maybe early seventies. He’s in Ottawa, and he’s pretty sick. One of his brothers drowned at residential school. I want to see if I can find the other one, while there’s still time.”

  “Now, I don’t know of any Manajiwin—that’s not a name I’ve heard before—but there’s a woman who lives here at the lodge who might. She’s even older than I am. She used to work in the kitchen at the residential school in Kenora. She’s from Sandy Bay, but she married a Nahwegahbow. She’s got a good memory, Mabel. She always beats me at cards.”

  30

  Inspector Ramirez drove to the medical tower for his second autopsy in as many days. He parked on a side street and glanced at his watch—he was late.

  He jogged down the stairs to the morgue and pushed through the swinging doors. The dead man’s body lay stretched out on the metal gurney. After being submerged in the ocean, it was almost unrecognizable as human. The skin was as shrivelled as old fruit. The smell of kerosene wafted through the room. There was always a thin layer of it on the waves; it left rainbows on the rocks.

  Hector Apiro stood at the counter, organizing his scalpels and bone saws. “Overalls, Ricardo,” the pathologist reminded him.

  Ramirez pulled a pair off the hook by the door and slipped them on over his clothing. “I’m sorry I’m late, Hector. Detective Espinoza and I met with Manuel Flores this morning to discuss the murders. It took longer than I expected.”

  “No need to apologize. I did the visual examination before you got here and took photographs.”

  “You found film?”

  Apiro smiled. “There were some seizures last night at the hip-hop festival. It seems the exhibit room has been restocked. You know, I wasn’t even aware until this week that there was a hip-hop festival. I feel like I’m learning a whole new language.” He laughed.

  Apiro walked over from the counter holding a razor-sharp scalpel. “I looked around for graffiti this morning when I walked to work. There was one that impressed me. An image of a toddler strapped with a belt of what looked like explosives. On closer examination, they were cell phones. Subversive, of course, but clever.”

  Apiro climbed to the top rung of his stepladder. He leaned over the body and made a cut down the cadaver’s chest. Gas escaped. Ramirez turned his head.

  “Ah, yes,” said Apiro. “The body returns to an elemental state quickly, doesn’t it? Carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane gas—a veritable primordial stew. When I hear of scientists trying to come up with the right conditions to re-create life in their test tubes, I often think they choose the wrong media. A decomposing corpse has all the essentials. Imagine bringing one of these back to life.”

  Ramirez nodded uncomfortably. He could all too easily imagine it. “Is it safe to light a cigar in here, Hector?”

  “Not only safe, but essential.” Apiro grinned. “But stand well back; the body could ignite. Let’s not create a real bomb this time, shall we?”

  “After what happened at the museum, I’m not sure the fire department would rescue us unless we paid them.” Ramirez stepped away. He reached beneath his overalls and removed a cigar from his jacket pocket. He lit it, cupping his hand around the match. “Initial thoughts?”

  “He was in the water for at least two or three days. The skin on his hands and feet has slipped off; that’s one indication.”

  Ramirez coughed lightly. He tried not to look. When he was in Patrol, he had attended autopsies of drowning victims where their skin could be removed as easily as socks or gloves. Sometimes entire fingers and toes were missing, nibbled away by fish. And in a badly decomposed corpse, the feet were often entirely gone. They sometimes washed up on the beach still wearing their shoes.

  “The nice thing about finding a body in the Atlantic,” said Apiro, “is that the salt and the cold water retard bacterial growth. Even so, his stomach is swollen as much with gas as with water. It’s the putrefaction that caused the body to float. One thing that’s surprising is that his corneas are filmy. Drowning victims usually float with their heads down. The water protects their eyes from the air. Quite startling, really, to see a corpse look at you with bright, clear eyes.”

  So I’ve learned, thought Ramirez. He pulled over a wooden stool and sat down, smoking quietly while Apiro went about his business.

  Apiro removed the man’s brain. He stepped down again and took the organ to the counter. He measured and weighed it before he placed it in a large glass jar full of formaldehyde. He peeled off his gloves and made a note on a pad of paper. The lights flickered, went out, then came on again.

  “Nothing remarkable,” said Apiro. He looked at the ceiling warily, but the lights stayed on. “The brain, I mean. The power being on is always remarkable. An interesting fact about the brain: It’s one of the few things where size makes no difference. Marilyn Monroe’s was actually larger than Albert Einstein’s.” He chortled.

  He put his gloves back on and clambered up his stepladder again. He made another incision, carving the body neatly all the way down to the pubic bone. He pulled the skin back to reveal the rib cage. He removed the man’s stomach. It looked like a wrinkled pink sack. He sliced it open.

  “I don’t see anything markedly unusual, Ricardo. Perhaps my intuition was wrong. It could have been a drowning. Maybe he took off his clothes to go for a swim and was caught by the current. Although we didn’t find any men’s clothing on the beach.”

  But we wouldn’t, thought Ramirez. Clothing abandoned on the rocks would be quickly recycled by anyone who came across it. If it hadn’t washed out to sea with the body.

  “We could probably close this file, then,” said Ramirez, “if it wasn’t for the ligature marks.”

  “Ligature marks?” asked Apiro. He lifted his head and raised his thick eyebrows.

  Coño, thought Ramirez, realizing his mistake. The marks he had seen on the ghost had slipped away with the corpse’s skin. He tried to think how to explain away the comment.

  “Hmm,” said Apiro, peering closely at the body again. “There is bruising in the soft tissue of the wrists and ankles.” He looked at Ramirez quizzically. “I would have missed it, most likely. It does look as if it was caused by restraints.”

  “Handcuffs, or rope?”

  “Impossible to tell. I’ll examine samples of the tissue under a microscope and let you know what I find.”

  “Was he wearing any jewellery?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Ramirez thought about the wide gold chain around the ghost’s neck. Was it a robbery after all, then, a snatch-and-run that went terribly wrong?

  “I hope we find out soon who he is,” said Apiro. “We can’t keep him in the morgue indefinitely. It’s very sad. He has a family somewhere. He deserves a proper burial.”

  Ramirez nodded. Where possible, the dead were buried within eight hours. The tropical heat was not kind to corpses, not even in morgues with
refrigeration units, because of the constant power outages.

  For the first time, it crossed Ramirez’s mind that Apiro would die someday. Ramirez always thought of his small friend as larger than life, as immortal. “Do you ever think of what you want people to say at your funeral, Hector?”

  Apiro paused for a minute, cocking a bright eye. Then he cackled with delight. “I’d like someone to lean over my casket and shout, ‘Oh my God, he’s alive!’ ”

  31

  Charlie Pike almost hoped the autopsy had been cancelled due to the lousy weather. Dead people didn’t frighten him, but seeing them cut open always unsettled him. He left his rental car in the parking lot by the nursing station. The SUV he parked beside looked like a creamsicle, almost completely covered under thick layers of ice and snow.

  He approached a woman standing behind the reception desk and asked for Adam Neville.

  “Dr. Neville is probably in the morgue,” the nurse practitioner said. “That’s down the stairs to your left, beside the vending machines. If he’s not, there’s a temporary office for visiting physicians on the lower level, too. He could be there.”

  When Charlie Pike walked through the swinging doors to the morgue, he found Neville wiping down a metal gurney with bleach. A woman’s body lay on a stretcher beside it, resting on top of what looked like a black plastic sheet.

  “Hello, Charlie,” said Neville. He appeared tanned and healthy. “Hell of a way to get back to work.”

  “Anii, Adam. You were on holiday?”

  “We were travelling down south for a few weeks. Denise is still in Pinar del Río. The president of the Columbian Mountain Climbing Federation is teaching a course she’s always wanted to take. She says it’s been wonderful. Pristine mountains, but not too challenging. She wanted me to stay, but I really had to get back to work. It’s her first time hiking and climbing in quite a while. She’ll be back at work as soon as they can find a place for her.”

  “I’m glad to hear she’s better,” Pike said. He liked Denise Labelle. She’d worked in the Winnipeg crime lab before she went on disability a couple of years earlier after suffering a minor stroke. “I didn’t know you were a mountain climber.”