Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  Maggie felt that if she turned the man down she’d have a rebellion on her hands.

  “Dinner, tomorrow. Sounds like fun. When and where?”

  “I’ll pick you up. I’ll make it a picnic. Bet you haven’t had one of those in a long time. I will see you at six.” The man stood up, and light from an overhead lamp flooded his face and turned his blond hair golden. “Well, I’ve probably overstayed my welcome.

  Besides, it looks like girls’ night out, and I do believe I am lacking the proper equipment. Though, you’re free to check.”

  Marie opened her mouth to answer that offer but Maggie cut her off.

  “Okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  John leaned over and kissed her cheek. It was then she noticed something.

  “John…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your eyes.” Maggie peered up into his face. It was dim in the bar but she was sure there was something different. “Didn’t they… I thought they were green…”

  Laughing, he shook his head. “No. You must have me confused with another incredibly handsome motorcyclist who knew your mother. My eyes have always been hazel. As long as I can remember. You can’t change something like that. I know you mentioned green the other night and I was going to correct you, but I long ago learned never to correct a beautiful woman. Ladies, ’til next time.”

  And with a chivalrous nod of his head, he turned and left the bar, leaving behind four women in various states of infatuation. A common thought among the women was how leather pants can appear so smooth on a man’s behind as he walks away.

  Ed, thirty kilograms overweight with a severely receding hairline, a snarly disposition and a missing index finger, showed up to replace him, as best he could. The good thing was he had beer with him, and all four of the women felt the need for something cool.

  “Wow.” That was Marie’s comment. “That’s, uh… that’s an interesting guy.”

  “I don’t normally like White guys, for both aesthetic and political reasons, but damn…” contributed Theresa.

  “Maggie, if you, like, get sick or break your leg, or are captured by aliens, can I take your place? Please? I like picnics. Oh yeah, love them.”

  “Elvira, you’re married.”

  “That happened eight years ago, Maggie. Gotta move on. Live in the now. And I so-o-o like hazel eyes.”

  As the women settled back into their seats, Theresa reached over and placed her hand on John’s now-empty seat. “It’s still warm from his ass.” She sighed.

  Elvira pushed her chair back and opened the top button on her shirt. “Christ, I need this cold beer!”

  All agreed and took hearty sips.

  This would be Maggie’s third beer of the night—unusual for her, but these were unusual times. The first dinner had been a thank-you. What was this one? Was it a date? What else could it be? Could this improbable, impossible situation actually be leading somewhere? And what about Virgil? She was sure she had noticed a bit of tension between him and John, but she supposed that was only to be expected. New man in the house and all that alpha male stuff. Still, if this did go anywhere (was she actually thinking this?), Virgil would have to be her number one concern.

  For a moment, she saw the two of them, John and Virgil, building birdhouses and fishing off the dock together. It was picturesque and heart-warming.

  Though something was secretly bothering her. His eyes. She was almost positive they had been green… hadn’t they?

  FOURTEEN

  It had taken Virgil almost two hours in the morning sun to paddle his uncle Tim’s canoe across the lake to Wayne’s Island. That was not including the time it took to work up his courage. Crossing the lake on his own in just a canoe was an understandable challenge—the motorized boats and their tumultuous wakes were a hazard to most small boats, but also, going to Wayne’s by himself required a little self-encouragement. His uncle’s island, easily observable across the water, looked like all the other islands. But this one was where Wayne did his thing… whatever that was.

  Actually, Wayne’s Island was a glorified spit of the Canadian Shield rising out of the water. Wayne had been the island’s sole resident for going on four years now. Everybody knew that and kept their distance. Virgil would have much preferred taking a motor-boat there, but Uncle Tim didn’t trust him on his own with his ten-horse-power motor. Still, however he had to get there, it was worth it. Wayne would know what to do—or so Virgil hoped.

  Of course Virgil didn’t tell Tim where he was headed. Or that he was supposed to be in school like all the other kids… adults had such a problem with that. But his grandmother had always told him there was far more to knowledge than just chalk, pens and Bunsen burners. Virgil almost believed that. As for Tim, he’d been placated by a simple story about Virgil doing a report on water samples for biology class. Virgil would deal with the ramifications of that lie later. Luckily Tim was such a bachelor and workaholic that he seldom noticed the difference between weekday and weekend. There just seemed to be more people around his shop on weekends.

  Up ahead, Virgil could see the island. The current, channelling the water from Otter Lake to Mud Lake, was weak in this part, so he was making good time. Virgil got the chance to canoe only rarely, and he found, much to his surprise, that he was enjoying it. It was a beautiful day, and a pleasant spring breeze was coming out of the west. The lake wasn’t choked with the weekend recreational boaters that seemed to be breeding with viral frequency. He knew the canoes of his fore fathers had been birch bark, not aluminum like the one he was in, but he found himself enjoying the rhythm of the paddling. An hour or so off shore, he saw a loon floating placidly in his path. One quick glance over its shoulder at the boy and suddenly the bird was gone, leaving several expanding ringlets of waves where it had been moments before.

  The boy instinctively stopped paddling, waiting to see where the loon would resurface. Playing a game with himself, he guessed possibly to his right, at maybe three o’clock. Instead, as if in defiance of the boy, the bird reappeared at eleven o’clock, shook the beads of water off its back and leisurely paddled away. Virgil watched him for a while before picking up the paddle and continuing his own journey.

  Wayne’s Island was a low hill, covered on the south side by cedar, pine, poplar and maple trees. From the sky it was said the island looked like a teardrop. On the north side, it was open and rockier, with a shallow stone bed that discouraged motorboats and houseboats. That was one of the reasons Wayne had chosen this small, three-square-kilometre island.

  On average, Virgil saw his uncle once or maybe twice a year. He had heard rumours about his uncle ever since he could remember. The stories tended to revolve around Wayne being some mysterious religious hermit seeking direction. Or possibly a Buddhist monk of some sort meditating all the time. Others thought he was over there worshipping the Devil. A few thought he was trying to practise the ways of their ancient ancestors, living off the land and all that. Only, it was a pretty small island, way too small to live off for more than a week or two. But most didn’t really care. It was just Weird Wayne and he was there doing what Weird Wayne did.

  Regardless, here Virgil was, looking for his crazy uncle because of a bizarre stranger who had come to town. He landed on the western side of the island and pulled his canoe up onto the forest carpet made of pine needles and cedar boughs. He’d only ever been here three times before, always with his mother, usually delivering food or just giving Wayne an update on family issues. The last time had been about two months ago, when his grandmother first fell ill.

  “Hello? Uncle Wayne?” Virgil’s voice was hardly above a whisper. Some small part of him was afraid at what he might find on this island, and how his uncle would react when they met, and Maggie wasn’t there. At the moment, that small part of him consisted of his vocal cords. Realizing this wasn’t very effective, Virgil started moving toward the centre of the island. He wasn’t exactly sure where the camp was but he knew it was in this direction.<
br />
  The boy could see several paths worn into the fallen vegetation, and decided to follow the widest. Along the way, he saw broken branches hanging off trees in every direction. They were all snapped in the same manner, either to the right, or to the left, in a small spot near the base. No long pressure fractures as if an axe had done it.

  “Uncle Wayne? Are you here?” he’d called out, but surrounded by this many trees, he wouldn’t be heard by anyone who wasn’t within spitting distance. He trudged forward, hoping to find his uncle’s camp. Small island or not, he didn’t want to be wandering around its interior for too long. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to.

  “I know you. Virgil, right?” came a voice from directly above.

  His heart pounding, Virgil looked in the direction of the voice. There, amid the cedar branches, sat his mother’s brother, Wayne Benojee.

  “Yeah, Virgil… Maggie’s son.”

  Wayne regarded the boy for a second before dropping down to the ground without even a grunt.

  For somebody who led such a weird life, Wayne looked remarkably average. He was thirty-two years old, and had long black hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a grey T-shirt and a worn jean jacket, worn jean pants and worn sneakers—in fact everything he was wearing seemed worn. But he was muscular in a wiry kind of way. His body said there was more to being dangerous than sheer physical strength. To his nephew, Wayne’s hands looked oddly callused. So this was his uncle Wayne. Virgil swallowed hard. This was what he had wanted, after all—to talk to his uncle. But the man was looking at him like he was an intruder.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” Wayne sounded like somebody who rarely spoke in English. In the family, it was well known that Wayne had been the favourite. Unlike with the rest of her children, Lillian had spent long hours teaching the boy the intricacies of the Anishnawbe, so that now he spoke it better than most seventy-year-olds. Even his years in local schools had not cracked his command of the language. But here he was speaking in English, knowing Virgil was of the generation whose knowledge of Anishnawbe was weak or non-existent.

  Virgil tried to talk but his vocal cords let him down, and he managed little more than a gurgle. Trying to gain control, he swallowed hard. Wayne studied the boy as Virgil sought desperately to say something coherent. Again it was Wayne’s voice that ended the silence.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! You’re scared of me, aren’t you! I don’t… people… they don’t…” Wayne seemed frustrated, and swung his head angrily, his ponytail doing a three-sixty. “Why is it that everybody’s afraid of me? I just don’t get it. I’m a nice guy. I know a couple of jokes. But for some reason, everybody seems afraid of me—even my own family. It’s ’cause I live here alone, isn’t it? Can’t a guy get some privacy without being branded a weirdo? Geez! It’s high school all over again.” Still frustrated, Wayne kicked a tree. “Your mother’s the only one who gives me the time of day, barely. What, do I have tentacles? Am I rabid? Do I smell? What? Huh? What?”

  A tantrum was not what Virgil had expected from his uncle. But that’s what he was observing. “Uncle Wayne?”

  “Finally! He talks to me. What?”

  “I need your help. It’s about Mom.”

  “Maggie?” Wayne’s face had become stoic. “Okay. You got my attention. What’s up with Maggie?”

  Virgil took a deep breath and stepped closer to his uncle. Time to pitch his case. “Well, you see, there’s this guy…”

  Sometime later, back at Wayne’s camp, they were sharing a cup of tea brewed over an open fire as Virgil finished telling the tale of the mysterious motorcyclist, and his blushing mother.

  “… and she was telling me this morning, they’re going out again tonight. A picnic, I think. I think she likes him. There’s something weird about him, Uncle Wayne. Really weird.” He almost said “weirder than you” but stopped himself. Instead, Virgil added more evaporated milk to his tea. Relieved that he could share his concerns with someone, the boy waited, sipping his sweetened tea.

  A puzzled look darkened his uncle’s face. “So what do you want me to do about it? Your mother’s a grown woman. She’s older than me. And you actually think she’d listen to me? She’d listen to you more than she’d listen to me. You know she used to beat me up when we were young? All the time… the little… Want more tea?”

  “Please. She did?” Virgil shook the question out of his head. He’d get to that later, once the more immediate crisis was dealt with. “But, Uncle Wayne, there’s something really not right about him. He can do strange things. Like animal calls. He sounds like the animals. I mean really sounds like the animals. Trains too…”

  Wayne raised his face to the sky and let loose a spot-on imitation of a loon call. “Like that?” Somewhere off in the distance, a loon responded, eager for companionship.

  “Better.”

  For the second time, Wayne’s stoic demeanour seemed rattled. “Better? Better than that?”

  Virgil nodded vigorously. “Way better. And he can do a bunch of others too that sound more real than the animals that do them.

  I’ve heard him. It’s scary. That’s the kind of weird I mean. It’s not normal. He’s not normal.”

  “Better than me?” Wayne muttered, swirling his tea. “Anyway, what do you want me to do about it? I’m just out here living my life. Doing my thing. Am I my sister’s keeper?”

  “Please, Uncle Wayne…”

  Tossing the last drops of his tea to the cedar-covered ground, Wayne dismissed Virgil’s worries with a shrug that looked oddly familiar. “Stop with the ‘please, Uncle Wayne.’ You’re the son of a single mother. You’d consider any guy showing any interest in your mother a threat. Basic psychology, I think. In my opinion, you’re worrying over nothing. Now go home and play baseball or something.”

  “Oh, give me some credit. I thought of that too. I am thirteen, you know. But you don’t know everything, Uncle Wayne. He kissed Grandma. And it was a real kiss, I mean, tongue and everything. The kind you see in movies. I don’t think it was normal. Now he’s hanging around Mom all the time.”

  This got Wayne’s attention. “My mother? He kissed my mother… that way? Why? And when? When did he do that? Huh? And why?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle Wayne, but if you cared about my mother, your sister, it would be worth just an hour of your time, wouldn’t it?”

  Wayne contemplated his tea for a few seconds. Virgil was conscious of time passing and hoped he could sway his uncle quickly. It would be getting dark soon.

  “Still, I don’t understand why you came to get me. You’ve got Tim and Willie right there, and all the rest. You paddle all the way over here to find me. Not that I’m not glad for the visit, sometimes I get kinda lonely and can use the company, but I barely know you. You barely know me. I still don’t get it.” With that, Wayne poured himself another cup of tea.

  Virgil took a deep breath and decided to play his trump card. “You know things.”

  “What do I know?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Everybody knows stuff. You know stuff. Your mother knows stuff. Most of it’s boring but it’s still classified as stuff.”

  “Uncle Wayne, he dances.”

  On a small island in the middle of a central Ontario lake, Wayne Benojee rolled his eyes, annoyed at the logic, or lack of it, presented by his thirteen-year-old nephew. “Virgil, everybody dances, most just not very well. I say this with the utmost respect to you, but so?”

  “He dances at night. By himself. On the dock down by Beer Bay. Under the moon. And it’s like no other dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s not right. It… he’s different.”

  This prompted a raised eyebrow from Wayne. “Not human? See, this is one of the reasons why I left the mainland. Too much of this television stuff screwing up minds. I don’t think you would even know what’s weird. And incidentally, weird can be good too.”

  Now Virgil was angry. “You’re one to talk! You and… and whatever it is you’re doing over h
ere. That’s weird. Everybody knows that. Do you know what they say about you?”

  “That I’m Weird Wayne. Yeah, I know. Tell me something new.”

  “What the hell are you doing out here anyways? Sacrificing goats or something?”

  “Who said I was sacrificing goats? I’ve never even seen a goat in real life. Why would somebody say that? That’s so unfair. People can be cruel.” Wayne sat down on a cut-in-half cedar bench, clearly hurt, tea dripping from his tilted cup.

  Seeing his uncle’s wounded response, Virgil realized he’d said a little too much. “Nobody. I’m sorry. Really. But people do wonder what you’re doing out here. All by yourself. Are you a monk or something?”

  Wayne watched the last third of the tea pour out of his cup onto the ground. “I am a martial artist. That’s all.”

  “Like karate or kung fu?” asked the boy.

  “Something like that. It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.” Another call of the loon could be heard coming off the lake. This one sounding a little more frustrated. “Anyway, you were saying about this John Tanner…”

  “Richardson. Or so he says. That’s another thing, out of nowhere he has two last names. And then there’s his eyes…”

  “I’m confused. How did we get from him dancing to his eyes?”

  “It’s all part of the whole thing, I guess. I think they changed colour. I’m almost sure of that. But I am sure about the dancing. The way he was dancing that night, it reminded me of a story Grandma once told me. It took me forever to remember it. Come on, Uncle Wayne, you gotta know it. About how Nanabush thought he was the best dancer in the world? And the grass disagreed. Ever heard it?”

  Wayne nodded. “Oh yeah. I know that story. It was one of her favourites. Yeah, the grass issued a challenge, and Nanabush, being the arrogant kind of guy he was, accepted.” Remembering the cadence of his mother’s storytelling voice, he mimicked it as the memory came to him. “So, one hot summer day, Nanbush and the grass decided to settle the issue. At dawn, they began, and they danced, and danced, and danced some more…”