I didn’t have time to move back to my room before Rose was at the door, the candle she carried throwing my crouching shadow and her standing shadow into knots on the floor. I was embarrassed at being caught eavesdropping. She just gave me a small, tight smile and, with a weird look in her eye, turned away and disappeared into a doorway two up from this one. I slunk back to my room.
I slept in just my shorts, wrapped up under the stiff blankets, surrounded by a barrier of dense pillows. I let my candle stay lit. I knew it was an extravagance I would regret later when we didn’t have any more portable light, but I enjoyed the way it flickered and jumped in the small breezes from the crumbling window panes, jumping against the walls and ceiling so that I remembered there were walls and ceilings around me once more.
Despite the long day and the late hour, I couldn’t sleep. Slopper’s and Minerva’s snoring filled the hallway with familiarity and every now and then I heard a cough or a sneeze that reminded me we were all still together. Still, I could not sleep. Instead, I stared at the small shadows and big emptiness of the starless ceiling.
There was a creak and a click and my door was shut. I pulled myself up quick onto my elbows, eyes adjusting to reach into the dark. When she got almost to the other side of the wide bed and into the circle of the candle’s glow, I saw that it was Rose, and I stopped breathing.
She was wearing a grey T-shirt that fell midway down her lean thighs. Her braid was undone and her hair hung in black waves. She looked directly at me, but didn’t smile. There was something else on her face, though. My breathing came back in double time. My heart was an echo in my ears.
She climbed onto the bed, and I moved over a bit to give her space. Still looking at me, she lifted the covers and slid under, beside me. I felt the complete length of her then like a warm sliver under my ribs. It was the best thing I’d ever felt. It made me brave, and I adjusted my arm so that it was a pillow under her head, so that all that soft hair could cover it like a web.
Then she began talking.
“Everyone in my family is short, every last one of us. When I was younger and we still had the house, my mother would pull out old photos of her people. Not the printed-up kind from computers, but the shiny kind on real film papers. Every one of her relatives was tiny, even when they were fat their height made them compact. My mom barely cleared five feet. My dad, well, he came from a less challenged lineage. He was from the islands, and his people were pretty damn tall. He stood around five foot ten. Me, I was eight pounds when I was born, and my mother never forgave me for it.
“My mom said her family came from the White River reserve before it was amalgamated into the wider Kenora band and then moved. She met my dad there when they brought over the last few families from Grassy Narrows. He was a student from the University of Winnipeg, studying our plants and their medicines. My parents were taken together, right at the beginning of the experiments before people knew they had to run like the devil himself was pissing on their heels. They didn’t care he was half black and his kind of Indian was the kind from the warm oceans. Guess they were less picky when it came to brown. I was only five when they left me with my granny. We played a lot of euchre.
“She sent me out with my great-uncles when they decided to hit the bush. She was too slow, she said, to come with us. So we left her in her little house on the old reserve lands she refused to leave, with a dozen jugs of clean water and a pantry half full of cans. She said that was plenty, that any more would be wasted.
“I walked into the bush with my granny’s brothers, William and Jonas, one afternoon and kept walking for six years before the first one fell ill. We set up camp when he couldn’t go on. We stayed there a full year before Will passed. We even grew a little patch of corn with seeds we’d brought from down south. After we buried him, Jonas and I packed up and started the walk again. We ran into a person every now and then, but Jonas never wanted to stay with them or have anyone come with us. He said he was charged with protecting me and he couldn’t trust no one with a little girl around. Jonas said our family had survived residential schools back in the old times and those stories were kept on down the line. He wouldn’t tell me much — he barely spoke now that Will was in the ground — but he did tell me to trust no one and to always make sure the camp was clear before I bedded down at night.
“‘A child needs walls. Not brick and wood walls all the time, but some sort of walls to keep them in and others out. So they can play and they can sleep and they can move without the burden of eyes and hands. I’m that wall for you. When I’m gone, you make your own walls with this,’ Jonas told me, and he held out Will’s hunting rifle to me. I learned to hunt small with wires, and bigger with that gun. Jonas and I, we walked for hours and days and months together. We didn’t really talk. He showed me things, though.
“‘You’re a woman now,’ he told me a few years ago, right after I turned thirteen. ‘That’s what you follow now.’ He pointed to the full, silver moon with two bent fingers. ‘That’s your granny.’
“About eight months ago, Jonas didn’t wake up.
“I dug the hole while he was still breathing. Because I wasn’t sure if I’d have the guts to do anything once he was gone. Once I was just me.
“Thought about turning around, heading back to my granny, but I knew there was no turning around. I could see as sure as a fire in the trees that they were there and she wasn’t. That she’d been swallowed up, though my bets were on her taking herself out before the schools could.
“I stayed by Jonas’s grave for four days and four nights. On the last night the full, silver moon hung low in the sky like a heavy rock in a plastic bag, ready to tear through the bottom onto your toes. Then I knew it was time. I cleaned up. I packed up. And I walked. And now, well, here I am.”
When she was done, she settled her chin in the crook of my collarbone. Her breath poured into the space like tea into a cup. I felt the brush of her bottom lip on my skin there and the small hairs on my arms lifted. She squeezed in closer, her stomach making contact with my side, bringing my full body to attention. I moved my free hand over the front of my shorts.
“‘Shit.” I tried pushing it away. I swallowed hard and breathed slow and steady, like you do when you have game in sight and you don’t want to scare it off. I hoped the concentration would take my excitement away. But then she moved her hand to cover mine and I almost died. It was such exquisite clarity of blood and skin and breath that I felt like crying. Instead I let her lace her fingers through mine and tilted my neck so that my face lined up with hers.
Her eyes were half closed, lips open. She was the most beautiful girl in the world and we were in a bed together. I watched the candlelight make red stars in her irises and thanked the Jesus I’d left it on. She moved her face forward, just a few centimeters, and I took her lip between mine. She slid a knee over my thighs and pressed closer. My pulse was a hand drum in the cradle of my gut. I wasn’t sure how long I could stand this before I just died from it. She pressed down on the front of my shorts with both our hands, and I couldn’t have seen straight if my eyes had been open.
“French, can I sleep with you guys?”
We jumped, neither of us having heard the door open. RiRi stood at the foot of the bed, rubbing her eyes with a fist.
“Holy shit, Ri!” I sat bolt up, throwing Rose off to the side. “Holy hell, I didn’t hear you come in.”
She just stood there. I guess with no precedent to go by, she wouldn’t really understand the concept of knocking. I sighed. It was Rose who threw back the covers and invited her in, pushing me further to the edge of the bed with a hip. “Come here, babe. Get in. It’s cold out there.”
She scrambled up the bed and jumped in beside Rose, pulling the older girl’s arm over her like a comforter. I tried to curl myself around Rose’s back, but the intimacy was further broken by RiRi’s feet thrown backwards over Rose’s knees so that they jabbed i
nto my legs like rounded icicles. Still, I was making the best of it, enjoying the smell of Rose’s hair across the pillow, pushing my sore groin into her backside a bit, when Slopper appeared behind me.
“Move over, French. I can’t sleep.”
“Christ, what’s wrong with everyone. I heard you snoring a minute ago.”
He just shrugged his heavy shoulders and pushed his way in behind me. And that was that.
I woke up when Minerva started coughing. The sound was deafening as she was sitting in one of the tufted chairs in front of the fireplace in my room. I jumped when I saw her there. How long had she been sitting in my room? She waved to me when I lifted my head. I tried to wave back, but I couldn’t lift my arm. In fact, my head was the only thing I could move. Slopper drooled on the pillow beside me and Rose was stretched out, her head back on my arm, on the other side. Beside her was RiRi, arms thrown out wide like she was making a great leap in her dreams. Our feet were trapped under a weight on top of the blankets that turned out to be Tree and Zheegwon lying perpendicular on top of the comforter.
I slid my arm out from under Rose, an almost painful separation, and climbed over Slopper, almost stepping on Chi-Boy, who was stretched out beside the bed, a discarded pillow under his head. Beside him was Wab. There were a few inches between them, but their breathing was matched, an even greater intimacy than touch.
So we were all here, crammed into one room, all of us besides Miig.
“Morning, French. I see we ended up having a slumber party last night.”
Spoke too soon. There he was, stretching out his arms above his head while he leaned up against the wall to the right of the closed door, his legs crossed in front of him.
I gave him a half smile and combed my hair with my fingers, smoothing it back and down, sitting on the edge of my full bed.
How the hell did everyone end up in here? I tried to remember. The memory of Rose punched me in the gut, and I stepped over Chi-Boy and Wab to the adjoining bathroom to empty my bladder and catch my breath. Of course, there was no running water, so I pissed down the sink and examined my face in the foggy mirror above it.
At the end of day two at the Four Winds, Miig was already getting antsy. Everything in his gut sang “move, move, move.” And Miig was a man who lived by his gut. I could see Chi-Boy already scouting the property for things to take with us. In the corner of the great room he’d stacked a wool blanket with wide colored stripes, a couple of knives out of the kitchen block, a dozen candles, a box of matchbooks stamped with the resort logo, every piece of food left in the pantry, which amounted to maybe twenty-five cans of beans and six cans of powdered milk, and a stainless steel kettle. What he didn’t stack there, but what I saw him slip into his bedroll when I was supposed to be checking behind the desk for maps of the area (which I found on the back of a placemat) was a lady’s trapper’s hat made from white fur with a thin leather ribbon tie dangling from the flaps. He’d found it in one of the storage rooms in the back and secreted it out to his bags under the folds of his grey sweater. I pretended to not notice.
Outside, Miig had found a shed, and though it was pretty well scavenged from when they first shut up shop, he did manage to find a two-wheeled cart, the kind you tow behind a four-wheeler.
“We’ll patch up these tires and take it with us. It might prove to be more burden than asset, so we’ll test it out for a few days. If it works, it’ll do for hauling Minerva on her off days.” He took Tree and Zheegwon with him to try to repair the tires and test its weight capacity.
Right now Minerva had found a rocking chair on the back porch of the building. There was a whole row of them out there, facing the back wall where thick sheets of wood had been nailed up against what must have been huge picture windows facing some kind of million-dollar view.
I was on patrol and wandered the building, hoping to find some new thing that would make Miig agree to stay. Here we had beds and warmth and walls. It was luxurious. I didn’t want to leave. And if I were being completely honest I’d admit it had more to do with Rose’s visit to my bed last night than anything else, a phenomenon that could maybe be coaxed out of heaven a second time. But I wasn’t admitting anything.
I followed a side hallway off the main room into the nest of tiny offices that lay back there — a janitor’s supply closet, a long room with lockers on either side, some still locked, others open with photographs taped to the inside and work jackets hung up, and finally a room with a desk and mountains of paper with a plaque reading “Manager” on the door. I found Wab sitting behind the desk in the manager’s office with a bottle balanced on a pile of yellowed printouts in front of her. When she lifted her head, she looked sleepy with her eyes half closed and a straight grimace on her lips.
“Hey, Wab.”
She took a couple of deep breaths. I waited, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, fixed in her stare. “Do you know how shitty my mom was?” she asked me.
I stared down at the tops of my taped-up boots. How should I answer?
“So shitty, dude. So, so, super shitty.”
This was the most she’d ever said directly to me. It was terrifying.
“You have a shitty mom, Frenchie?” She picked up the bottle and spun the cap with the side of her hand. It came off the bottle and flew across the desk, clattering to the floor like a plastic coin.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Good for you, man. Good for you.” She took a short swallow from the bottle and put it down hard.
“You know what I did before I got here?”
I looked up at her. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was tipping the bottle side to side, watching the amber liquid slosh and wave.
“No.”
“I ran.” She laughed with no joy, like a cough racked with sickness.
I backed away from the door. I felt like she should be alone, not sure I wanted her to keep talking.
Instead, she got dark, stood as on a wire, and made her way around the desk. I didn’t move, not sure of what my role was here, or if she even still saw me. I wasn’t sure until she fell on my neck and sobbed, right as Chi-Boy came around the corner.
Wab was the one I was the most anxious around until Rose joined the group. We were all a little uneasy around her, I think. She was hard to figure out. Harder even than Miig or Minerva; their personas were clear. Their trauma was stark and motivating. Wab’s was less defined, messier somehow, and therefore more dangerous.
Wab was movie star beautiful, all tall and harsh. When I first came to the group, she was still wearing an eye patch, like a real villain. Now she just faced the world with one eye, a long red slash from her right cheekbone to the middle of her forehead over the other. The scar had knotted itself into raw seam that closed the socket forever.
Her teeth were straight and white. Her hair was down to her butt and burnt a warm umber from the sun. She chopped wood better than Miig and was stingy with her words. She could crush aluminum cans with a bent flex of calf and thigh, and every boy, myself included for as long as I could remember, had at one point or another harbored a secret crush and more than a few night-time fantasies over Wab.
We’d begged Miig for her coming-to story, since she’d never waste enough words to share it herself. We’d been on a hunt the last time we really drilled him for info on our mysterious love interest, a little before Rose showed up.
“I heard, after she killed a man with a pair of scissors in the city, that she pulled her own eye out so she’d never have to look at herself in the mirror again,” Slopper had said with round eyes and dramatic breaths.
“I heard she was a mercenary for one of the West Side gangs,” said Tree.
“And that she lost her eye when an East Side gang attacked their clubhouse,” said Zheegwon.
“And that when she woke up and saw her eye was missing, she found the East Siders,” said Tree.
&
nbsp; “And killed them all, removing the right eye from each body before she left for the bush,” finished Zheegwon.
Chi-Boy just laughed at us. Miig leaned over the trap he was trying to show us how to reset and beckoned us in with a lowered voice. “Then I guess you boys better be careful who you dream about without her pants on.” We turned four shades of red; even Chi-Boy was a little pink in the neck, revealing that maybe his dreams were a little more than wolves and Grandfather Teachings.
“Besides,” he’d added as went back to hooking the spring in its latch, “everyone tells their own coming-to story. That’s the rule. Everyone’s creation story is their own.”
Together, Chi-Boy and I carried her to the main room and set her on the couch, still teary, but silent again. The twins ran and got Miig, who lit a small smudge for Wab. Normally we’d bring everyone together for a smudge, but the air was dark and the littlest kids were safe on the back porch in rocking chairs with Minerva.
Wab took handfuls of thick smoke and rubbed her face. I wasn’t sure she’d talk. Miig sat quietly beside her, staring at his fingers laced into each other. Rose and I sat cross-legged on the floor beside the table. Chi-Boy hovered nearby, uncomfortable with uselessness. The twins leaned on each other on the opposite couch.
Then she began.
WAB’S COMING-TO STORY
Before they emptied out, the inner cities were swarming with desperation-hungry bellies, pinched guts, lousy scalps, dirty necks, and the people who made money off of it all. The alleys grew lean-tos and shelters made of layers of melting cardboard like hives. The apartments were stuffed to overflowing, and people huddled in the hallways. They made their homes in the stairwells after every room was taken, so that once the elevators were shut off you had to bribe your way through living rooms and sleeping babies to get to and from your apartment.
I lived on the top floor with my mother. She drank. Men came. Men left. One day my older brother Niibin stopped coming home and it was just the two of us — the two of us and the revolving parade of men with dirt-stiff jeans and bloodied knuckles. Sometimes they came after me, waking me up from my sleep when they tried to jam their rough hands in my pajamas. Sometimes they got more than just a feel before I could fend them off and lock myself in the bathroom. I hated it there. There were more bugs than food in the kitchen. And when they shut off the water first and then the power next, it stunk and the rats came, braver than the bugs, more invasive then the men. Eventually, after the raids started, someone set fire to the building trying to cook Spam over a hall fire and me and mom were on the street.
The Marrow Thieves Page 7