“Mmm, tasty.”
“They are.” As if to prove it, she popped a few in her mouth and chewed with her eyes closed. I tried one, and it was so sweet it was almost piercing. I had never noticed that there were different types of blueberry bushes. If it was blue and on a bush, you picked it. Ma-ma-oo pointed out the contrast in the leaves and stems, but it was easier to see the distinctions in the berries themselves. We found the other kind, sya’k°nalh, “the real blueberry,” shiny bluish-black berries, prettier, but not as sweet as pipxs’m. We drove around, going higher up the mountains until we found the third type, pear-shaped and plump and sweet. Their Haisla name is mimayus, which, loosely translated, means “pain in the ass,” because although they taste wonderful, they’re hard to find and to pick.
“We used to call my sister Mimayus,” she said, smiling fondly at the berries in her hand.
“You have a sister?” I said.
“Oh, yes. She died long ago.”
“Was she older or younger?”
“Older.”
“And she was a pain in the ass?”
“Her real name was Eunice.”
“How’d she die? Is it okay to ask?”
“Yes. Do you ever run out of questions?”
“No. But I can shut up if you want.”
She chuckled. “I think that would kill you.”
We spent the last of the good weather tromping through bushes, picking berries and watching “Dynasty,” with Ma-ma-oo shouting advice to the wayward Alexis.
Namu, Ma-ma-oo explained later, means whirlwind. The area is famous for whirlwinds. Usually, they’re only the small ones; they play on the water, go in the bay and dance out. She found this out after Mimayus fell in love with a Bella Bella boy. To be closer to her handsome Heiltsuk, Mimayus went to work in the cannery in Namu where her Bella Bella boy had a job as a fisherman.
But one Halloween, Mimayus hitched a ride with a man who was on his way to Bella Bella in his gillnetter. Her Bella Bella boy’s birthday was the next day, and his family was throwing him a huge party. Mimayus wanted to surprise him, so she had told him she couldn’t make it. The weather had been iffy all week, sometimes hot and summery, sometimes blistering cold. But that day it had been especially bad. Towards evening, when the sky cleared, the man said they should make a run for it now or they wouldn’t make it at all.
A troller also going to Bella Bella had agreed to follow behind the gillnetter so they could help each other out if anything went wrong. The skipper of the troller was bringing his pregnant wife to the hospital. Both the boats were old.
One of Mimayus’ friends was supposed to go to Bella Bella with her, but she chickened out. Mimayus waved as the gillnetter left the dock and promised to bring her friend some chocolates if she could find any.
Mimayus’ friend watched the two sets of boat lights getting farther away. As she was about to turn around and go back inside, she saw the lights in front blink out. Shivers ran down her back; she said she knew right then that Mimayus was gone.
Out on the water, hail came down. The couple in the troller were arguing. The wife wanted to turn back, but the husband said the hail wouldn’t last. It battered their boat for a few minutes, then stopped suddenly as a strong wind started. The wife looked up in time to see a funnel descending from the clouds like a black finger. The sound, the wife said, was like a thousand people screaming. Her husband immediately turned their boat around.
The wife looked back and saw the gillnetter struggling to turn, bobbing and dipping like a toy in the rough water. As the funnel touched down in front of Mimayus’ boat, the wife wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t. She watched in horror as the gillnetter was sucked into the air.
The couple made it back to Namu, but Mimayus and the gillnetter’s skipper were never found. Neither was the gillnetter, but its engine was discovered a week later, washed up on a nearby beach.
The rain is easing. Sea gulls circle and land on something between the logs on the rocky shore. A flock of sea gulls is called a squabble, and they are doing that right now, fighting for a place on whatever has washed up on shore. As my speedboat buzzes by, some of the sea gulls hop away, revealing something dark, but then they cover it again. It must be big to have attracted so many. On the other side of the channel from me is a tanker on its way to Alcan’s dock. It moves with the ponderous weight of a loaded ship, is low in the water and oblivious to me. When we were kids, Jimmy and I used to watch the tankers through binoculars and try to decipher the names. Some were Russian or Japanese, or rusted beyond reading.
The crows wait at the outskirts of the squabble. They are little black dots that flutter and edge nearer to the corpse until the sea gulls drive them away. A flock of crows is called a murder.
Make your hand into a fist. This is roughly the size of your heart. If you could open up your own chest, you would find your heart behind your breastbone, nestled between your lungs. Each lung has a notch, the cardiac impression, that the heart fits into. Your heart sits on a slant, leaning into your left lung so that it is slightly smaller than your right lung. Reach into your chest cavity and pull your lungs away from your heart to fully appreciate the complexity of this organ.
The bottom of your heart rests on your diaphragm. The top of your heart sprouts a thick tangle of large tubes. Your heart is shrouded at the moment by a sac of tissue, a membrane called the pericardium, which acts like bubble wrap by both protecting your heart and holding it in place. Peel away this sac. Inside is a watery lubricant that minimizes friction when your heart beats. Shooting down from the aorta—the large tube arching on top of your heart—are two large arteries that branch out like lightning forks over the heart muscle.
Behold, your heart. Touch it. Run your fingers across this strong, pulsating organ. Your brain does not completely control your heart. In the embryo, the heart starts beating even before it is supplied by nerves. The electrical currents that ripple across your heart causing it to contract are created by a small bundle of specialized muscle tissue on the upper right-hand corner of your heart.
The good thing about having a thirty-five-horsepower outboard motor is that it doesn’t need a whole lot of gas. You can go days on a couple of tanks. The bad thing is the putt-putt factor. It takes forever to get anywhere. Also, I travel by sightlines, aiming for one point, holding the boat steady until we get there and then picking another landmark.
Nic-fit. I’m dying for the extremely satisfying ritual of shaking a cigarette out of a pack, placing it between my lips and sucking in that first hot puff. Mmm. One lousy smoke left, but I’m saving it. Should have waited at the village and done a cigarette run. A bit too late now. I try to concentrate on other things. Technical terms I learned in biology. “Atrium,” from the Latin, meaning the central courtyard of a Roman house. “Ventricle,” Latin also, meaning belly or stomach. “Septum,” a partition; in the cardiovascular system, a partition between the right and left sides of the heart. “Ischemia.” Isch-, to hold back; -emia, a blood condition. “Infarction,” the death of cells.
The weather is inspiring my gloomy turn of thoughts. Or maybe it’s knowing that Mom and Dad will be in Namu today, hunting for Jimmy. Ah, irony. We’re all out on the water. The whole family is together.
I should have gone. I should be with them. They didn’t want me to go. It would be too much, they said, to have me there. They didn’t say “if something goes wrong,” but from the way they looked at me, they didn’t have to. I don’t know what I would have said when they found the life raft. But Jimmy isn’t stupid. Josh isn’t stupid. They are two smart men. Nonetheless, I want to be there right now. I ease off the throttle when the boat skitters. Since I’m riding with the tide, I’m not doing too badly. I tuck the throttle under one arm as I reach for my thermos and pour myself a cup of coffee. It steams and swishes in the thermos cap. I’ve put too much sugar in it, though, and the taste, burnt onto my tongue and tickling the back of my throat, is acidly sweet.
The first rep
ort cards came in. My grades hovered dangerously at a C—. Most of the comments read, “Doesn’t participate in class. Not working to full potential. Not concentrating, please set up an appointment to discuss study habits, etc.” Frank began to hit me with snowballs at recess. Jimmy, on the other hand, made the honour roll every time. He’d even made it into the Northern Sentinel, holding up a swim medal with one hand, the other arm over a teammate’s shoulder. The caption read, “Future Olympic Hopeful Jimmy Hill Wins Regionale.”
Jimmy hadn’t really known Mick and he was so immersed in his swimming that an alien invasion couldn’t have distracted him from perfecting his stroke rate. Having no ambitions beyond getting through school, I had no way of understanding Jimmy. When the Olympics came on, he glued himself to the set, watching every single swimming event. Sometimes he went over to his teammates’ houses and watched with them, but he seemed to like it better by himself, absorbed. He would pore through the times set by little countries and announce that if he lived in Yukatuka-too, he’d have qualified for the one-hundred-metre butterfly. His games all ended with him getting a medal and placing it around his own neck.
Jimmy’s grades slipped a bit as he put everything into his swimming, but he tried, and that seemed to count for something. At school, we ignored each other. In his teammates, he had a ready-made circle of friends who had nothing to do with me. Most teachers were surprised we were siblings.
Nothing they taught me meant anything. None of the stories I read in English had anything to do with my life. As long as I could add and subtract, I didn’t feel a need to have any great math skills.
While browsing through some albums, I found what used to be my favourite ABBA collection. Disco was officially dead, but just for old times’ sake, I put it on the record player and was boogying away in my bedroom when I noticed Jimmy and a bunch of his swimming friends goggling at me from the doorway like I was a loonie. The moment I noticed them, they smirked at each other. Jimmy stood stiffly in front of them, arms up as if he was trying to shield them from something hideous.
“She’s adopted,” Jimmy said to his snickering friends.
“Come on, Jimmy!” I said. “Do the hustle!”
“And brain-damaged.”
“Don’t be shy,” I said. I went over and grabbed his arm, but he jerked back like I had the plague.” Jimmy used to be a big ABBA fan, didn’t you? Remember that Frida poster you used—”
“I did not!” Jimmy said, face turning red.
“… to have up over your bed?”
“I didn’t,” he said to his friends. “She’s a big liar.”
“Wow, was he in love!”
“Shut up!”
“Of course, now he likes Boy George.”
“Let’s go,” Jimmy said, reaching around and slamming the door in my face.
I sang “Karma Chameleon” at the top of my voice.
That Friday at the breakfast table, Jimmy took his Walkman off long enough to say, “My friends are coming over this weekend.”
“Whoop-dee-doodle.”
“So don’t be a freak.”
I glared at him. “Like you’re not one.”
“Lisa—” He stopped, sighed and put his earphones back on. He hunched over his cereal and chewed furiously. I stuck my tongue out at him. “Grow up,” he said.
He was too wiry to throw down on the floor and tickle like I used to do when we were younger. As I looked at him, an idea formed. Finding the copy of the monkey mask Dad had bought was hard. He kept it in a box stuffed away in the attic, which had never been organized. I had to clamber around for an hour before I found the right box. I shook out the dust, brought it downstairs and hid in Jimmy’s closet.
While I was waiting, it occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. But as I was reconsidering my plan, Jimmy and his friends came into the bedroom. I slowly lowered the mask over my face. It was heavy and the fur was itchy. Jimmy and his friends lay on his bed and pulled out their books.
Oh, man, I thought. This is going to take forever.
After what felt like hours, but was probably only fifteen minutes, Jimmy stood up and walked over to the closet. As he opened the door, I hopped out, roaring and waving my arms. Jimmy’s expression of horror, his complete and utter terror, was beyond anything I’d expected. His friends leaped off the bed and screamed like sissies. I raced out of the room with Jimmy and his friends in hot pursuit. I tossed the mask on the living-room chair, laughing as I headed outside, zipped down the steps and took off towards the rec centre.
“You’d better run!” Jimmy yelled after me from the porch.
I gave him the finger.
“You’re gonna get it!” Jimmy said. “You hear me, you freak? You’re gonna get it!”
The next day, Frank left a dead frog in my desk. It was dark green and tiny, barely out of its tadpole stage. I stared at it, then slowly turned to face him. He smiled at me. I hated his smug expression, the cocky way he lounged in his chair. But what made my blood boil was that he’d killed the frog just to make me scared. I grabbed his chair and yanked. He landed with a thud, yelled and held his head where he’d hit the floor. I reached into my desk, grabbed the frog and tried to stuff it up his nose.
Unfortunately, the teacher pulled me off. We both had to write “I will not fight in class” a hundred times on the chalkboard. She wrote notes for our parents to sign. Mom was going to be pissed, but I was sick of taking it. From now on, if he was going to try anything, I was going to give as good as I got.
At lunch, I sat with Erica and her friends in our usual spot near the seesaws. They gossiped and giggled, talking in high, excited voices about how to get bigger hair, what they were going to wear to the Christmas dance, and which boys were the cutest. Anger flashed through me—they seemed so young and stupid. I must have been making a face because Erica turned to me and asked me why I was looking so crabby.
“We talk about the same stuff every day. Aren’t you bored of it?” I said.
“If you think we’re so boring,” Erica said in an aggrieved tone, “why don’t you go sit somewhere else?”
“And miss your fascinating debate on hair spray?” The second it came out of my mouth, I knew I’d have to start apologizing or I’d be socially dead. But I couldn’t bring myself to care. It was my voice saying these things, but it felt like I was watching some mildly interesting program on TV.
Erica snapped her eyes at me, then turned back to her friends, who spent the rest of the day pointedly ignoring me. When the last bell rang, they shadowed me to the bus stop. They hadn’t got up the courage to start name-calling yet, so they were just whispering. I stood apart from them and glared at my hands, trying to think of a convincing way to tell Mom I wanted to change schools. I looked up to find Erica’s gang forming a circle around me, giggling and giving me sly looks.
“She looks like a boy,” one of Erica’s friends said with the greatest contempt as they took the bus seats directly behind me.
“She is a boy.”
“No,” Erica said. “She’s an animal.”
“Hey,” one of Erica’s friends said, pushing at my shoulder. “Hey, Miss Piggy.” More giggling. They began oinking.
“Well,” I said. “At least I didn’t have an accident on the Zipper, did I? I’m not scared of a baby ride.”
Total silence. I turned to look Erica right in her face, which was flushing the deepest, darkest, most satisfying shade of red. Tab had told me that when they were on the carnival ride and their car got stuck upside down at the very top, Erica had panicked. If I kept my mouth shut, it would end right there. They would pretend I didn’t exist and I could live my life in peace. But when I looked into Erica’s furious face, I couldn’t stop. “Isn’t that right, Pissy Missy?”
She lunged. I’d never seen her move so fast. She grabbed fistfuls of my hair and yanked for all she was worth. It hurt like hell, but I just pushed her away and laughed, which made her slap my face.
“You’re an animal!” Eric
a screamed. “You’re nothing but a lying animal!”
“Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy,” her friends began to chant.
“Pisssssssssss,” I said, still gasping with laughter.
Erica’s arms were pinwheeling so fast she looked like a cartoon, but she was so mad that most of her hits missed me.
Then, from the back of the bus, Frank and his friends started their own chant: “Pis-sy Mis-sy, Pis-sy Mis-sy, pisssssss.”
“If you don’t knock it off,” the bus driver yelled, “I’m stopping the bus right here!”
Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.
My fall from grace was spectacular. If I’d had head lice, scabies, worms and measles, I couldn’t have been more unpopular. Rather than sit with me on the bus, kids would sit on the floor. Rather than be my lab partner in science class, kids would claim to be sick and have to go to the nurse’s office. Rather than eat with me, kids would throw their lunch bags in the garbage and claim they weren’t hungry. All I had to do to be back in Erica’s good graces was grovel and kiss ass, but I’d die before I did that.
After school, when I walked into Ma-ma-oo’s house, the smell of spice cake floated through the room. Ma-ma-oo had a cake pan as large as her oven. Ba-ba-oo had made it especially for her. It was older than me and deep brown with encrusted oil. It made enough cake to feed sixty people. At funerals, when so many people visit and the family members are not supposed to cook for themselves, huge amounts of food have to be prepared. She used to have two pans, she told me, but the other one wore out. In the past, she’d used it for weddings and showers, but lately I’d begun to think of it as her death pan.
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