Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

Uncle Geordie phoned later that morning to say that the seals were getting at the nets, and that if we wanted any of our coho, we should go out and check them.

  “Mick’s truck is here,” Dad said as we drove into the bay.

  “Maybe he’s having coffee somewhere,” I said.

  Dad frowned, parking the car at a distracted angle to Uncle Mick’s truck. “Flirting away with someone, I bet, when he said he’d check the net.” Dad honked the car horn impatiently, but Uncle Mick didn’t appear. “Dammit, the seals will get everything.”

  I hadn’t slept since the little man left me. I kept thinking, Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. Mick’s just goofing off. He’s fine.

  The rest blurs like a shaky homemade movie. My feet, heavy as we walked down the dock. The speedboat’s outboard motor, cranky and refusing to start for five endless minutes of Dad yanking on the cord. The choppy ocean. The net, all the corks along the middle sunk under the water. Mick’s speedboat pushing itself against the shore, nudging it and scraping slowly along the rocks. Seals bobbing their dark heads between the whitecaps as Dad picked up his shotgun and fired and fired at them, then reloaded, saying, “Don’t look.”

  Morning light slanted over the mountains. The sky was faded denim blue. Grumbling, a raven hopped between the branches of the tightly packed trees. Water sparkled as a seal bobbed its dark head in the shallows. A deer paused at the shoreline, alert. It flicked its tail up, showing white, then bounded up the beach and into the forest. In the distance, the sound of a speedboat.

  Spotty wakes me from a dream about Monkey Beach. She is in the greengage tree when I wake up. She screeches, hops, and I hear her hit our roof, then trundle back and forth, her claws clicking against the shingles. La’sda, she says. Go into the water. La’sda, la’sda.

  The house has grown a thick scum of quiet. An unhealthy hush reserved for terminal wards. The living-room light is on. I make myself a hot chocolate. I vividly remember the first time I got a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. Marvelling at how big it was and how much chocolate I had, and then biting into the ear too hard, expecting resistance and meeting nothing.

  The phone rings and I close my eyes. Anyone calling this early has either very good or very bad news. I pick up on the third ring.

  “Lisa?” Dad says. His voice is shaking. I can hear Mom crying in the background.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “We—” He takes a breath. And another. “They found a life raft.”

  “A life raft. Are they sure it’s from the Queen?”

  “No,” Dad say. “But no one else is missing.”

  “Was anyone in it?”

  “No.”

  “Dad, I’m coming down as fast as I can. Is Mom okay?”

  He doesn’t answer. I ask where he is, where the life raft was found, then say goodbye and hang up. I should have gone with them. I should have gone. I call the twenty-four-hour line for Air Canada, but the travel agent says it is a busy week and now the people from a soccer tournament, a Health Canada conference and nine wedding parties are returning to Vancouver. She says I could try standby, but there are already fourteen people at the airport trying to get on the same flights. The next available seat is in four days. Canadian and Coastal Mountain are the same. The charters out of Prince Rupert are booked solid because it’s the height of the sports fishing season. I phone the airlines again, thinking that if I explain about Jimmy, I might get on a flight if someone is willing to get bumped, but all the lines are busy.

  It takes twenty hours to drive to Vancouver—sixteen if you ignore the speed limit. You have to go inland all the way to Prince George and then down and back to the coast. Add the hours to get to the island, and maybe you’ll get a spot on the ferry up to Bella Bella and you’ve wasted almost two days. The bus is a twenty-four-hour ride. The ferry out of Rupert won’t leave for two days. The train takes three days. Most of the boats are out fishing right now—

  Why didn’t I think of it before? God, I have no brain in the morning. Of course, I have a speedboat. Damn thing is only 35 horsepower so that’s three hours to Butedale, then three hours to Klemtu, then three or four hours to Namu. Add an hour for bathroom breaks and rest stops. I could be in Namu early this afternoon. On the night Jimmy disappeared, I dreamed he was at Monkey Beach. His seiner went down so much farther south, so I don’t hold much hope of that dream being anything but a dream, but I can stop there for a few minutes, since it’s on the way, just to be sure.

  I want to get out of the house before Aunt Edith wakes up, so I don’t pack much. If she finds out I’m going, she’ll make me wait for Uncle Geordie to take me down and we’ll waste valuable time getting a hold of him, waking him up, breakfast, blah, blah, blah. I leave her a note telling her about the life raft and saying that I’m going to meet up with Mom and Dad. Then I steal the keys to Dad’s speedboat. He used to have a gillnetter, but he sold it because it used too much fuel. He kept the speedboat, though, so he could set the net. Jimmy is the big salmon eater in our family. He’ll go through two jars a day if we let him. Dad jokes that he’s going to grow gills.

  It isn’t even light out yet, but I walk all the way to the docks. The speedboat hasn’t been used in months. When I pull off the tarp, I have to bail the stupid boat because of the rain water collected on the bottom. I haul my stuff on, then cast off. With a deep breath, I go to the stern, then yank the motor cord. It takes three tries before the motor kicks in. The sound is so loud that I’m sure someone’s going to run down and stop me. I drive to MK Bay Marina and wait for the gas station to open.

  Gordo comes down first. “Playing hooky from school?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “A little day off won’t hurt anybody.”

  He laughs. “Tell that to my boss.”

  I fill up four gas cans on Dad’s credit card. I store them in the back while Gordo disappears into the store.

  “Wear your life jacket!” he yells to me as he casts me off.

  I wave to him. As I drive by the village, I watch our house for signs of life. No lights are on. Daylight makes the sky dark grey. Clouds hang low and flat across the entire sky. The air’s nippy, the engine’s noisy, and the whole day stretches ahead of me. Since it’s early in the morning, I’m going out with the tide and there’s no wind. Rain splatters me. I blink, water creeping down through my collar, plastering my hair flat and stinging my face. I’m cold and can’t see much, but I don’t mind. There is nothing like being on the ocean to clear the head.

  PART TWO

  The Song of

  Your Breath

  Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

  The tide is wicked. When I go against it, my speedboat does a crazy, sideways slither. The sky, one sheet of pissing greyness, stretches low across the horizon. A sea gull squalls overhead as it flies towards Kitamaat. This early in the morning, the beacon in the distance is still blinking, a forlorn warning against rocks. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve spent hours watching it flash. Sitting on top of a short metal tower painted red and white, the beacon is about fifteen klicks from the village. When I see that lone flash of white light against a vast stretch of darkness, I feel deliciously alone.

  I’m passing the old graveyard. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from the village, but barely a five-minute ride on my boat. Mick took me there for the first time when I was little. I remember staring at the graves, thinking how messy they looked, with ragged clothes and pots and junk around them. The next time I went, I was a little older and with my summer day-care group. We had to take rubbings of the headstones and bri
ng them back to class and describe to the others what we had seen. Most of the kids went for the carved totems, the fancy writing, but I saw this plain headstone with nothing on it but the number 100 and a backwards F. Since it was simple to copy, I put my paper against it and rubbed my pencil across the surface. As I was standing in front of the class, I held up the paper and the light shone through it. 100F was really “Fool” backwards. No one in class knew what it meant, so I brought the rubbing to Ma-ma-oo after school, and she told me that everything in the land of the dead is backwards. When you are in the next world, our day is your night; our left is your right; what is burnt and decayed in our world is whole in yours.

  At Mick’s funeral, the casket was closed. The picture on his coffin was a blurry black-and-white from his basketball days, when he was sixteen or seventeen, trophy in one hand, smiling into the camera, confident, young and clean-cut. He had never talked about his glory days as a most valuable player. The picture wasn’t the Mick I knew. I sat in the front row of folding chairs and stared at the picture, thinking: that was the person Mom had dated.

  When I glanced over, I saw one of Mick’s friends from his A.I.M.’ster days—a group of about seven men and women had traveled up to Kitamaat. The man seemed familiar, and then I realized he smelled of Sagos, the same brand Mick smoked. Barry, I thought, remembering his name. Barry sang an honour song for Mick as we walked in the funeral procession. His voice was high and I didn’t understand anything they were singing, but it covered the squeaking sounds of the coffin being lowered into the ground, Aunt Trudy’s wailing, and finally, the dirt hitting the top of the coffin. Mom took my hand and squeezed it. Aunt Kate put a hand on Aunt Trudy’s shoulder, whispering to her. Dad put our wreath on his grave. When he walked back, Mom put her hand around his waist. Jimmy stood beside Dad, staring at the ground.

  The crush of people left to give the family time with Mick. We stood in a circle around the fresh and the plastic flowers. I concentrated on the trees. They creaked and swayed in the wind. The sun was out and I was hot in my black dress. Mom’s hand was sweaty. She led me past his grave and I knew I was supposed to say goodbye but I stood there until she tugged on my hand and led me away.

  We went to Ma-ma-oo’s for cake and drinks. Mom brought Dad coffee and they stood with Aunt Edith and Uncle George.

  “Don’t tell me to take it easy!” Aunt Trudy yelled at Aunt Kate by the kitchen. “He’s fucking dead! If I want to cry, I will fucking well cry! I don’t care if you’re embarrassed.”

  Kate bit her lip and stepped away from Trudy. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I have feelings! Unlike the rest of you bastards!”

  Someone came and sat beside me. Jimmy nudged my arm and offered me spice cake on a foam plate. I shook my head. “I’ll leave it here,” he said, putting it on the chair between us before he left. I looked down at my hands. When I looked up, Aunt Trudy was sobbing on Josh’s shoulder. He stroked her hair, talking in soothing tones. Aunt Kate picked up her jacket and left. Erica followed. Tab slid away from her mother and asked me if I wanted some pop.

  “Tabitha,” Aunt Trudy turned to us, “we’re leaving. Now.”

  “My mother,” Tab muttered. “The drama queen.”

  “What did you say?” Aunt Trudy said.

  “I said okay.” She gave me a hug, then whispered. “Excuse us while we make a dramatic exit.”

  Aunt Trudy came up and gave me a hug too. “You take care of yourself.”

  “Back at you,” I said and she smiled.

  “You come and see me later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Josh shook my hand and gave me an envelope. “Just because.”

  I nodded at him. When I opened it later, there was a sympathy card and two pictures, one of Mick holding up a basketball trophy and one of him and Mick on his seiner. They were grinning like crazy as they lifted a giant halibut between them. Josh had also included a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

  As the afternoon wore on, people came and went. Some of them sat with me, and gave me food. I had a plate overflowing with food by the time Barry came up to me.

  “I gotta smoke,” he said. “You want to keep me company?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  We went to the front steps, but there were people there, so we walked down the beach and sat on a log. The tide was low but coming up. Near the old wharf, two little kids were horsing around in the water, squealing and splashing each other. A couple of months earlier, a boy had ridden his bike off the end of the wharf. People wanted to pull it down because the wood was rotting and everyone agreed it was an accident waiting to happen. Barry finished rolling his cigarette and lit it. He reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a battered picture. He handed it to me. A man with a really bad Elvis hairstyle and an Indian woman with a mile-high bouffant were kissing. I squinted, bringing the picture closer. God, I thought, that’s Mick.

  “That’s my sister, Cathy,” Barry said. “But we all called her Cookie. That’s their wedding picture. See the guy in the corner?” There was only half a dark brown face and it was painted with flowers. His mouth was wide open, showing missing front teeth. “Crazy old bastard is my uncle. He’s the medicine man that married them. They made him sing some fuc—I mean, some damn Elvis song. We were all kind of nuts back then, but Mick and Cookie …” He shook his head.

  “Were you there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Never saw anything like it. They broke up couple of days later. Got together again, made up. Remarried. Fought. Broke up. After a while, none of the medicine men would marry them no matter how much they tried to bribe them, so Cookie told everyone they were living in sin even by Indian standards.”

  “What did they fight over?”

  He grinned. “Faster to say what they didn’t fight over.”

  A woman started yelling at the little kids to quit swimming and come in for dinner. They yelled back that they just wanted five more minutes. She waded in and pulled one of them out of the water and he let out a despairing howl. Barry was watching me. I stared right at him.

  “Mick wasn’t in the water long, but the seals got him.”

  He sucked in a breath. “Bad way for him to go. Bad thing for you to see.”

  I held up the picture. “When he had nightmares, he’d call out her name. I used to think he was having bad dreams about cookies.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He took it hard when she died.”

  “She died? How did she die?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette. He looked out over the water. “Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, you bitch, and I’m proud of it.’ ” He laughed and shook his head. “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”

  “How’d she meet Mick?”

  He hooted. “Oh boy. Well, she joined A.I.M. right after me and we were going around to all these rallies. We stopped over in Vancouver and we were protesting something, jeez, what was that, the block—”

  “You were at a rally,” I interrupted.

  He looked at me, raising an eyebrow. “You talk to all your elders like this?”

  “Only the ones I like.”

  “Uh-huh. We were at a rally. Some of the guys were going off to a sweat and she wasn’t allowed to go because she had her period. She was pissed off and telling everyone how wrong it was and the guy that was making a speech had to tell her to shut up and she started yelling at him. Mick piped up that tradition was tradition and if they wanted to get back to the old ways, they should follow them. Then they were off! They stood in the middle of a crowd and shouted at each other until they were hoarse.”

  “So it was love at first sight?”

  “Nah. Worse. Sh
e finally met her match. She was never going to be happy until she argued him into the ground. Did Mick tell you about Washington and the Trail of Broken Treaties?”

  “When A.I.M. occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building?”

  “Yeah.” He started to tell me about it, then said he’d explain it to me when I was older. I leaned my head against his shoulder. I closed my eyes, suddenly glad I didn’t know how she died. I didn’t want to hear anything else that ended badly. He gave me a piece of paper. “You did him a lot of good. You ever want to talk, you give me a call, okay?” We went back inside and he left with his friends a few minutes later.

  I kept the paper with his address and phone number in my jewellery box. He wrote me once, a short letter with bad handwriting, the words packed tightly together and jittery on the page. He was proud to know Mick. When things got screwy, he wrote, Mick stayed on the path of true human being. I always wanted to know what he meant by screwy. I still have his address kicking around somewhere.

  At a family meeting a few days later at our house, Aunt Trudy and Aunt Kate got into a scrap over Mick’s basketball trophies, medals and awards. Dad didn’t want them. Ma-ma-oo wanted them put over his grave, but everyone said they’d just get stolen. Trudy claimed she was closer to Mick than anyone in the family—they had suffered through residential school together, they had the same friends—but Aunt Kate loudly told everyone she was worried Trudy would use some of them as ashtrays or break them in one of her parties. Trudy shouted that she would fucking well appreciate the trophies better than Kate, who would only put them in a box somewhere and forget them. Dad divided the trophies into two piles for his sisters. They glared venomously at each other.

  I knew Mick wouldn’t care as long as he got his cigarettes. I wished he was with us, because he’d make some stupid joke and everyone would forget what they were arguing about and laugh.

  That night, we heard an ambulance wailing through the village. I ran downstairs and overheard Mom talking to someone about a fight going on at Aunt Trudy’s. I later learned from Tab that Josh had tried to claim some of Mick’s medals, and Trudy had broken a beer bottle over his head. Josh’s fishing crew fought with Aunt Trudy’s drinking buddies until Josh was thrown down the front steps and broke his leg.