Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  “Holy,” I said.

  Tab smiled, looking smug. “I’d say the honeymoon is over.”

  Aunt Trudy was evicted. Tab came over the night before she and her mother left, saying they were going to live in Vancouver. I couldn’t imagine school without her. As a going-away present, I gave her my teddy bear, Mr. Booboo. Tab held him by one frayed ear and examined him. He was mostly patches by then.

  “He gives good hugs,” I explained.

  On Mick’s birthday, Jimmy followed me down to the Octopus Beds. I didn’t want him with me, but he came anyway, even when I told him to go jump off the dock. I brought a tin of Sago tobacco, a portable stereo and an Elvis tape. I picked up all the dry driftwood that I could carry, and made a fire. I turned on the tape recorder, and Elvis sang “Such a Night.”

  The waves surged against the rocks. Down the Douglas Channel, I could see fat, lumbering clouds inching south.

  “For Mick,” I said, throwing loose tobacco on the fire.

  “What are you doing?” Jimmy said.

  “Just shut up,” I said, staring out at the place where Mick used to set the net. My father had pulled Mick’s corpse from the net and wrapped him in a tarp. Mick’s face, right arm and part of his left leg had been eaten off by seals and crabs.

  “What did he look like?” Jimmy asked me, greedy for details.

  “An ugly fish,” I told him. “A bad catch.”

  Two weeks later, Uncle Geordie got eighty-two sockeye. He gave Ma-ma-oo twenty, his wife’s parents twenty and twenty to us. Mom took me over to Ma-ma-oo’s, who insisted that she didn’t need any help, that she wanted to do the smoking herself. Mom said they’d help each other.

  Dad set up two sawhorses and put some planks on them to make a table behind Ma-ma-oo’s house. Mom let me chop the heads off the fish. Sockeye are heavy. The easiest way for me to decapitate them was to stick my fingers in their eye sockets to hold them in place while I cut off their heads. As I got better, Mom let me cut off the tails and fins too. She did the cleaning and deboning, and Ma-ma-oo did the datla, carefully slicing the salmon for smoking. Crows flapped in the trees around us, eying the pailful of fish guts. Mom didn’t like to give them food because, she said, what with Jimmy’s feeding them, they’d just keep hanging around the house, lazy buggers, and wait for handouts, shitting on everything in sight.

  The sky was cloudy and threatening to rain. Ma-ma-oo was silent, working so fast that she would have to stop and wait for Mom and me. My hands got tired, but I liked having something to do. “Oh, you learn fast,” Mom said to me as I handed her another fish. We went through half the fish, and I helped them put the long slices of red flesh on sticks. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the rafters of the smokehouse, so Mom and Ma-ma-oo put up the racks of fish. Mom went inside to start canning the other half of the sockeye and left me out in the smokehouse to keep Ma-ma-oo company. The smoke was sharp and hurt my eyes. The shack was warm and dim. I instantly started to sweat. I removed my jacket and took it outside so it wouldn’t smell smoky.

  Ma-ma-oo was sitting on a block of wood, staring at nothing. Now that she didn’t have anything to do, she sagged. I sat down on the ground beside her, yawning. She covered her eyes with her hand. Her shoulders started to shake. She never made a sound when she cried.

  I rested my head against her knee. She put her other hand on my neck. The skin on her fingers was rough; her hand was warm and smelled of fish.

  Ma-ma-oo and I were driving down a narrow logging road that went through the bushes on the Kitimat River tidal flats. She stopped the truck when the road was too overgrown to see the gravel. She handed me a shovel then slung her rifle over her shoulder and walked into the bush. From inside the truck, the trees were very pretty. As I followed her, fending off branches and crunching through dry leaves that hid mud puddles, I was less impressed with the brilliant green colours of late summer. Rain soaked through my jeans, my jacket. I was covered in mud up to my ankles and Lord only knew what Mom was going to say about my new running shoes. A long time ago, there had been an old fishing camp here, and before then it had been a winter camp. Some of the houseposts still stood, giant, grey logs leaning heavily into the wild tangle of undergrowth, but now the old camp was being washed away by the river. The people had made nets out of du’qua, stinging nettle, and it was growing wild everywhere. The tall, skinny plants with fuzzy leaves stung worse than jellyfish.

  We came across bear scat. It was still moist. Ma-ma-oo kicked it around then bent over and stared into it as if she could see her future in the heavy brown shit. She paused, getting her bearings, then wiped the rain off her face.

  “Look,” she said. “See the fish bones? It’s really fattening up for winter.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “You can tell where the bear’s going to be by its scat. Berry seeds, it’s up the bush. Fish bones, it’s down by the river.”

  “It’s still gross.”

  “You kids these days.”

  After another half hour of slogging, she stopped in front of a plant as tall as her, with broad, smooth leaves that branched off the stalk like a tulip’s leaves. It was topped with tiny, white flowers.

  “Just watch,” she said, handing me the rifle.

  She took the shovel and started digging a big hole around the plant. When she hit the root, she started digging with her hands. The root had a small dark bulb, but then it went stringy like a creamy yellow mop. When she’d exposed enough of the root, she began tugging until it came loose. She brushed off the dirt and motioned me to come closer.

  “Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”

  “How?”

  “Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”

  “Like incense?

  “What’s incense?”

  “Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”

  “Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”

  “Why?”

  She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain. But don’t eat it, hear? You eat it, and you go to sleep and you don’t wake up. Good for arthritis. Joints. Hard to use, though. You have to do it right or your heart stops. Bad, slow painful way to go.”

  “Cool.”

  She shook her head. “You kids.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and unwrapped the cellophane.

  “Holy. When did you start smoking?”

  “Not for me. I’m getting some cedar branches. You leave tobacco here, see?” She broke one of the cigarettes and left the tobacco scattered at the bottom of the cedar trunk. She said some words in Haisla, then she broke off one of the branches. “We’ll get four for you, and four for me.”

  “You’re giving tobacco to a tree?”

  “The tobacco is for the tree spirits. You take something, you give something. I’m asking for protection. Going to go up in the corners of my house. Put these in your bedroom. Hang them up like this.”

  “What do the spirits look like?”

  She paused, looking up into the top of the cedar tree. “I don’t know. Never seen one. The chief trees—the biggest, strongest, oldest ones—had a spirit, a little man with red hair. Olden days, they’d lead medicine men to the best trees to make canoes with.”

  “Oh,” I said, shaking. All the air left my lungs for a moment and it felt like I couldn’t catch my next breath. “Oh.”

  Ma-ma-oo glanced at me curiously, then began walking again. She picked another tree and offered tobacco.

  I made my voice very casual. “What would it mean if you saw a little man?”

  “Guess
you’re going to make canoes.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “No one makes them any more,” she said. “Easier to go out and buy a boat. Old ways don’t matter much now. Just hold you back.”

  “What else would it mean if you saw one?”

  She touched my hair. “You seen one?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah, you have the gift, then. Just like your mother. Didn’t she tell you about it?”

  “What gift?”

  “Your mother’s side of the family has it strong. Do you know the future sometimes? Do you get hunches?”

  “Predictions? From the little man. He comes, then something bad happens.”

  She eased herself down onto a stump, then patted the space beside her. “Here, sit.” She frowned. “Your mother never said anything?”

  “She just said he was a dream.”

  “Hmmph,” she grunted. “He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

  “What about Mom?”

  “When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on. T.B. Flu. Drinking. Diseases. She used to know who was going to die next. But that kind of gift, she makes people nervous, hey?” She smiled.

  “Mom doesn’t see anything,” I protested.

  Ma-ma-oo grunted again. “She doesn’t tell you when she sees things. Or she’s forgotten how. Or she ignores it. You’ll have to ask her. Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more. And I was too young back then to put them in here.” She tapped her temple.

  I was only half-listening to her. As soon as she said you could communicate with your dead, I wondered if I could talk with Mick. “How do you do medicine?”

  “All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s like oxasuli. Tricky stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  We hung the cedar in her house first and put oxasuli on the windowsills. When we put the cedar up in my room, Dad came in and raised an eyebrow when he saw what we were doing, but he didn’t say anything.

  The raven flying near the shore catches my eye. It croaks, then disappears into the trees. I loved Ma-ma-oo’s stories about the cheeky, shape-changing raven named Weegit. I try to remember a story she told me, but I am distracted. My hands are chapped and tingling from holding the throttle. I wish I’d thought to bring gloves. I hadn’t thought it would be so cold in the middle of August. I think it was grade seven when I learned that wind starts as a difference in temperature between the air and the ground. Whatever the reason, the waves hitting the bow send constant shudders through the speedboat. Worse, the spray sent up by the bow keeps putting out my cigarette.

  School started four weeks after Mick’s funeral. Mom and Dad came into my bedroom and asked me if I was feeling up to going. I was tired of them hovering over me so I said it was fine.

  God, I thought as he walked into my math class, don’t do this. Please don’t do this. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Tab had moved to Vancouver, Frank had been kicked out of his school in the first week and transferred to mine. He’d been kicked out of most of the elementary schools in Kitimat because he kept beating up other kids. He sat in the seat directly behind me, grinning. As the teacher did roll call, Frank began throwing spitballs into my hair. She called out his name, and he said, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

  In her first and last letter to me, Tab commiserated with my bad luck. Meanwhile, across the playground from us, Frank was taking charge of his cousins, Pooch and Cheese, two of the meanest boys in school. They raced each other to the top of the hill near the swings, then pushed each other down.

  Frank always sat behind me in class and as the weeks wore on, he began pinching and jabbing my arms. He’d reach forward and poke hard enough to bruise. He began to kick my chair. Telling the teacher would make him and his thugs gang up on me at recess—I’d seen him do it to other kids. Complaining about him would be an unending hell of getting picked on in the village and at school. As far as I was concerned, someone else could have that privilege.

  Some days, it was hard to do anything. Even eating seemed like too much trouble. I’d lie in bed and stare at nothing, and hours would pass in a flash. Then the next thing I knew, Mom would be calling me for dinner. It wasn’t even painful. I felt nothing. Blank.

  Other days I wanted to run. Really run, push myself until I fell down. I ran up and down the highway, up the power lines, around and around the village. When taking a breath hurt, when sweat soaked me right down to the tips of my hair, when my muscles spasmed and ticked, I stopped. After the first snowfall, Mom made me stop running because she said the last thing I needed was a broken leg.

  After supper one evening, I was listlessly doing homework at the kitchen table. Dad had walked over to Uncle Geordie’s house to watch a hockey game. Which meant that he and Uncle Geordie were going to get tipsy and annoy Aunt Edith by smoking inside, drinking beer without using her coasters, spilling chips on the carpet and shouting wildly whenever their favoured team scored. Mom was out visiting. Jimmy went into Dad’s pockets and filched his car keys. “You wanna go for a ride?” He spun the key ring. “It’ll be fun.”

  I felt my eyes stretch wide in disbelief. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “No guts,” he said. “No glory.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “We’ll be back before anyone even knows we’re gone.”

  “What’s got into you?”

  Jimmy shrugged. I’d never seen him like this before, and wondered if he would actually go through with it.

  We grabbed some things we thought we’d need, then strolled out to the car. He put on a baseball cap and clicked in his seat belt. I tucked my hair under one of Mom’s old wigs and put on a pair of her huge sunglasses, which kept sliding down my nose.

  “One of these pedals is the brake and one is the gas,” he said, scowling in concentration. He fumbled with the keys for a while. The engine kicked in. I peeked out the window. No one was watching us. As he sat in the driver’s seat adjusting the pillows we’d stolen from the living room, it occurred to me that we knew squat about driving.

  “It would make sense that the pedal nearest my right foot is the gas, because you have to step on it more. I think Dad used this one—” He moved the top stick to R and pressed down hard on the pedal. The car shot out of the driveway, right across the street and up our neighbour’s driveway. We were almost to their door before he stomped on the brakes, jerking so hard that I bumped my head on the dashboard.

  “Maybe now,” he said, “would be a good time to put on your seat belt.”

  He drove to town, slowly and cautiously at first, and then with more speed. I liked the sudden freedom, being away from everyone and everything, able to go wherever we pleased. Jimmy’s face was flushed, his eyes sparkled and he couldn’t stop smiling. “You want to try?”

  I grinned. “You betcha.”

  The wig was hot and itchy, but I didn’t want to take the chance of someone seeing me without it. Jimmy tensed and lowered his head whenever a car heading towards the village passed us, but I casually lifted my hand and waved and got a jolt of pleasure when people waved back, not at all suspicious.

  Jimmy turned on the radio and cranked it. “Funky Town” was playing, and we started singing along. He tilted his seat back and laughed, then said, “I always wanted to tell you something.”

  “What?” I said. We were nearly to Hirsh Creek when I saw the police car in the rearview mirror. I lost track of the road for a minute and almost steered us into a ditch.

  “What’s wrong?” Jimmy said, his voice rising. “What’s happening?”

  “
It’s okay, it’s cool. Don’t panic—”

  “Panic?” Jimmy spotted the police car in the side mirror. “Holy fuck,” he said breathlessly. “Holy fuck. It’s the cops.”

  The lights flashed in my rearview mirror. My throat went dry. I pulled over and rolled my window down. I looked up innocently at the officer, who frowned down at me in my overlarge wig.

  “Evening,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’d ask you for your driver’s licence,” he said, “but I’d be wasting my time, wouldn’t I?”

  I felt my face flushing deep red. “Would you believe I’m pregnant?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean, my brother’s got a bad stomach ache. He really has to go to the hospital—”

  Jimmy punched me hard in the arm.

  “Let’s call your parents,” the officer said.

  There is nothing like a police escort to attract attention. The police officer lectured me and Jimmy all the way home, while his partner followed us in my dad’s car. When we got home, Dad started shouting and didn’t stop until Mom started and they drowned each other out. I sat meekly in my chair and went to bed, grounded until kingdom come, which turned out to be four weeks later. They didn’t yell at Jimmy—and if he wasn’t going to tell them it was his idea, I wasn’t going to bother to explain something they’d never believe anyway.

  The weather was still good so Ma-ma-oo grabbed her berry pails, took me out to the Terrace highway and we drove up a logging road. She’d inherited Mick’s truck, and sometimes I’d look over and expect to see him.

  “Look,” she said, coming up to a bush. “See these ones? Pipxs’m.”

  “That’s what you call blueberries in Haisla?”

  “No, no, just these blueberries. See, they have white stuff on them. Pipxs’m means ‘berries with mould on them.’ ”