Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  “Lisa.” It was fainter, and I wondered if Dad was calling me from the house, and that was what I was hearing.

  Something came slithering in my direction, a heavy weight being dragged through the undergrowth somewhere close. In the distance, I heard a crow. It was joined by another crow, and another until it sounded like there were hundreds of crows cawing. Then, as I was near the trail, I heard the same slither. There aren’t many snakes around Kitamaat, just the little green-and-brown garden snakes. They’re shy, though, and you rarely see them, except on the road if a car runs them over. I breathed through my mouth, curious, not moving in case I frightened it.

  I waited like that for maybe a minute before it moved again. Soft, clicking sounds came from a bush not more than two metres away from me. I thought, No, it must be a grouse, and I waited for it to thump its chest. The slither came closer, the sound low to the ground. Could be a porcupine, I told myself. Porcupines can move fast, and they do click, but this click was different. I moved slowly towards the bush and pushed them aside.

  There was nothing weird about the crab, except that it was up in a bush. It raised its claws, turning around to face me. It was a good-sized Dungess.

  I backed away. The crab turned, skittered sideways into a clearing, past a stump towards the trees in the centre. I wasn’t sure if I should follow it or not. The wind shifted and I had to cover my mouth because I smelled the fermented aroma of old meat left in the garbage, of something gone bad in the fridge. On the other side of the trees, I saw a rusty oil barrel. The crab had stopped beside it, barely ten feet away. I could almost see inside. Six crows sitting on the lip of the barrel lifted into the air as I walked towards them. The smell was strongest there, and normally I would have puked. Instead, I took the lighter fluid out of my jacket pocket and just as I was going to toss my clothes in the barrel, I saw one tiny grey corpse of what was once a kitten, or maybe a puppy, shriveled against the scratched-up side of the barrel.

  “Lisa!” a voice said from somewhere inside the forest.

  I turned my head. I expected to see a person but there was nothing but trees. The crows launched themselves upward in a flurry of wings. I became aware of whistles, high and piercing. They were in the trees. Some were musical, like flutes. Others played long, continuous shrieks.

  “Who are you?” I yelled.

  “Guess.”

  “Quit screwing around! Who are you?”

  A different voice, barely a whisper, said, “We can hurt him for you.”

  “Yes,” a chorus of other voices said, “Yes, yes, let us, yes.”

  When I said nothing, there was giggling from the trees.

  I looked down at my plastic bag. I didn’t want any witnesses. I didn’t want any reminders. For a moment, I thought I saw Cheese at the edge of the clearing, but when I turned my head, it was only a piece of cloth caught in some tree branches.

  “Bring us meat,” the first voice whispered. “And we’ll hurt him.”

  It’s your overactive imagination, I told myself. No one’s in the trees. You are alone. The voices hissed into silence. I turned the barrel over and the bugs underneath skittered and squirmed away from the rain. The tiny corpse rolled out of the barrel and landed with a thump in the wet grass. I righted the barrel, put my clothes in, squirted them with lighter fluid, then set them on fire. I watched them writhe and shrivel. I wished he would burn. I wished him pain and unending agony. Then I dug a little grave for the dead animal, wiped my hands on my jeans and left.

  I tilted my head and my reflection in the bathroom mirror stared back at me quizzically. I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed. Maybe it was because I had bed head. I combed my hair out until the spikes stood straight up again. Maybe it was just fatigue. I’d had strange dreams all night.

  “Lisa!” Mom called out from downstairs. “You have company.”

  She was at the door, standing between me and Frank. “We’re taking Trudy and Tab to the farmer’s market today, Lisa,” she reminded. “You have five minutes, then I want you to get ready. No dawdling.”

  “Okay,” I said. I smiled at Frank. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Five minutes,” Mom said as she walked into the kitchen.

  “I heard you,” I said. I stepped onto the porch.

  Frank studied me as I stood beside him. He walked down the steps and I followed him and we sat on the bottom one. He held out a cigarette for me. I took it. He lit it, then shook out his match. “Cheese told me last night you guys are going out. He said you guys did it.”

  “Yeah?” I said. I put my cigarette against my lips and I slowly inhaled. “Did you believe him?”

  “I don’t see why he’d lie.”

  “Cheese said you told him to go ahead and fuck me.”

  “What?”

  “Did you?”

  His mouth opened and closed as if he was a goldfish.

  “Cheese lies, Frank. He lies and he’s mean. Tell him if he comes near me again, I’m going to kill him.”

  “Lisa,” Mom yelled. “We have to get ready.”

  “Bye, Frank,” I said.

  On the first anniversary of Mick’s death, Ma-ma-oo took me to the Kitlope to pick ci’x°a. The first night of our trip, we stayed in the Kemano fishing village. The yellow light of the fire shone through the crack in the wood stove’s door. I was glad we were sleeping beside it.

  When I awoke, Ma-ma-oo was gone. I sat up quickly, wondering if she was all right. I had visions of her tumbling down the steps, unconscious in the outhouse, slumped over the boat. But when I stood at the porch, I saw her sitting farther down the beach. She turned and motioned me to come sit beside her. “Over there,” she called. “Look.”

  A single black dot broke the surface of the water and a curious head watched us. The seal ducked under, sending ripples through the flat water. We watched to see where it would come up. A raven made a trilling, bubbling sound somewhere in the trees behind us.

  “You hear that?” Ma-ma-oo said as I came to sit beside her. “That’s a good sign. Good day today. Any other call but that one would be a bad sign.”

  I was still watching the water, but the seal never resurfaced.

  Near noon, we stopped at an old logjam near the beach. I finished my sandwich in four gulps, then flopped on the ground and stared up at the trees. Ma-ma-oo forced down half her sandwich, then asked if I wanted the rest.

  The wild crabapples grow on trees at the bend in the river there. I reached up into the tangled grey branches for the hard little apples. She pointed out thick patches. I dropped them down and she put them in a bucket.

  The second night, we set up camp on the same sandy beach where I’d seen the great blue heron. Ma-ma-oo made corned beef hash but rubbed her stomach, saying she’d had too many ci’x°a and gave me more than my share.

  This time, I curled into her before she fell asleep. Her hands were cold. I shivered when she touched me, and she pulled the blankets over us. It reminded me of the last time, when we set out the tent and Mick was on one side of me and Mom on the other.

  I was startled awake by the sound of footsteps crunching across the sand towards us.

  “Ma-ma-oo,” I whispered.

  The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. I shook Ma-ma-oo’s shoulder and she grunted, unwilling to wake up. I turned my head slowly, but nothing and no one was there. As I was pulling the sleeping bag over my head, something bright streaked across the sky. I paused. The clouds had cleared, the moon was down, and the stars shone hard and unwinking white against the late-night sky. Another frantic streak seared its afterimage against the darkness. I closed my eyes and made a wish. When I opened my eyes, three falling stars, one after another, raced each other across the tops of the mountains. The frequency built until the sky was lit by silent fireworks.

  When we got back to Kitamaat, I told Ma-ma-oo about the footsteps on the beach. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They
’re just ghosts.”

  When I dreamed, I could see things in double exposure—the real world, and beyond it, the same world, but whole, with no clear-cuts, no pollution, no boats, no cars, no planes. Whales rolled in and out of the water, and not just orcas either. Some of them were large, dark grey whales. Some of them were smaller and black. Hundreds of birds I’d never seen before squawked and chirped in the air, on the beaches, in the trees. Later, in the spring, the beaches were white with herring eggs. Oolichans came next, filling the rivers so full with their shiny, shimmering bodies that I was sure I could cross it and not get my feet wet.

  I began sleepwalking and, Mom and Dad told me, I sometimes picked things up, stared at them, put them down or walked in circles. I awoke from one of my wanderings to find Erica and Aunt Kate leading me home.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Erica said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Hello, Aunt Kate.”

  She put an arm around my shoulder. “Hello yourself. We almost hit you, you know. You walked right in front of our car.”

  “Did you?” I looked around but couldn’t see their car. “Where did you park?”

  “Near the bay. Does your mom know where you are?”

  I blinked, dizzy and cold and still not focusing on them. “I think so.”

  “Let’s get you home anyway.”

  “Oh, look. Is there a party going on?”

  “What?” Erica said.

  “All those people are going into that house. I don’t recognize any of them.”

  “I think she’s still sleeping,” Aunt Kate said.

  “No,” I said, realizing that the people were ghosts. “They must be an escort. Someone in that house is going to die.”

  “She’s sleeping,” Erica said.

  Mom and Dad brought me to the hospital to find out what was wrong. The doctors did test after test, but couldn’t find anything. I was watching a nurse line up bottles that I realized would have to be filled with my blood, and as soon as the nurse picked out the needle, I left. There was no way I was staying around for that. The hallways were filled with ghosts. They stood watch over their families. Some of them watched me with strange, sad eyes. When I came back to my body, the nurse had called the doctor and they were watching me curiously. They said I had been walking around and around the bed.

  The doctor took Mom and Dad into a separate room and they talked for a long time. I stayed in my body while the nurse took my spinal fluid. I squeezed my eyes closed and thought about going out on the boat with Ma-ma-oo.

  Pooch knocked on the door when the nurse left. “Hey, heard you were in for some tests.”

  “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “My gran’s getting some tests too. She’s just down the hall.”

  “Is she all right?”

  He nodded. “Are you?”

  “Yup. Healthy as a horse.”

  He sat beside me on the bed. “I was talking to Frank the other night.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you guys get in a fight or something?”

  I frowned. “I guess.”

  “He’s pretty mad at Cheese. I couldn’t get him to say why. Gave him a black eye and a fat lip. Isn’t talking to him. Won’t talk about you. What happened?”

  I picked at a loose thread on my jacket. “Nothing.”

  Pooch rolled his eyes. “God. That’s exactly what he said. Is it something Cheese said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Pooch said. “He can be an asshole. Just ignore it. Frank and me are going to a party tomorrow. You want to come?”

  I shook my head. “Can’t.”

  He patted my shoulder. “I gotta get back to Gran. See you.”

  When we got home, Mom gave me cookies and a blanket and let me watch TV until I fell asleep. Dad woke me up later and said I should get to bed. He tucked me in, kissed my forehead.

  “No sleepwalking,” he said.

  “No sleepwalking,” I agreed.

  Look closely at the skin on your wrist. The blue lines are arteries. They are blue because they carry oxygen. If you pinch off one of these arteries, your hand will tingle. You have blocked the artery and your muscles are starving for oxygen, giving you pins and needles. If you climbed Mount Everest and got frostbite on your hands, they would turn black and die. Among other things, the arteries to your hands could no longer supply blood to the muscles because they would be blocked. The amount of damage would depend on the severity of the freezing or blockage.

  When oxygen-rich blood is pumped out of the heart to the body, it travels up through a large tube called the aorta. The heart feeds itself through two large arteries that come off the aorta and fork down like lightning over the heart muscle. If the arteries are narrowed with plaque deposits, your heart will tingle. These unpleasant pins and needles in your chest are episodes of angina pectoris, often shortened to angina. If the plaque breaks off and blocks the arteries that send blood to your heart muscle, your heart will starve. This is a heart attack.

  All heart attacks cause damage to your heart muscle. The severity of the attack depends on where your artery is blocked. If one of the smaller branches is blocked, you will have a tiny heart attack. If a main branch is blocked, you will have a severe heart attack.

  Skinny Point is one and a half kilometres north of Monkey Beach. The tides are strong, and mix everything up, so the five families that used to winter here could fish just in the bay and get both halibut and cod. If I was going to stay the night, I’d go to the house near the beach, a triangular building set back in the trees. The beach is rocky, and sea gulls squall over resting spots. A brown seal barks, lifts its head and wriggles, arguing with its neighbour. I move away from the shore so my propellers won’t get caught in the kelp.

  The creek to the left of the house leads up to a lake, where there was the last official sighting of a sasquatch. Or, at least, trappers had found a footprint in the mud, as long as the stock of their rifle. Ma-ma-oo said the two men who saw it are still alive. I’m sure she said they saw it.

  On a typical morning, Jimmy and Dad would sit up front and talk basketball, and I’d try to sleep in the backseat but would end up listening to the radio. Dad was lucky enough to get on the morning shift, so Jimmy’s swimming practice fit right in with his work schedule. At the pool, he would stay for a while and watch Jimmy do laps and exercises. I hated the smell of chlorine, the moist heat of the change rooms and the eerie way sound echoed off the ceilings and walls. The whole place made me claustrophobic. But Jimmy’s long brown arms would lift and fall as smooth and fast as a waterwheel. When Jimmy went to meets, my ears would ring with Dad’s shouts for hours. But on those early mornings, he would sit with his coffee between his hands, not moving at all, just watching Jimmy. Sometimes I would sit beside him. Most times, I would wait in the car for him to drive me to school. He would be quiet afterward, as if he’d just got out of church.

  He never talked about it. I think he was afraid to jinx it. Jimmy in the Olympics. He grinned sideways when anyone mentioned it.

  On the second day of grade eight at lunchtime, I saw Frank for the first time since we’d talked on the bottom steps. He didn’t look at me. He was hanging around with a group of older boys and none of them would deign to look me. I told myself it didn’t matter.

  Erica was completely unsympathetic. “I can’t believe you were friends with him. He’s a psycho hosebag.”

  It was hard not to feel dumb for having liked him. I kept walking and pretended not to see him either.

  Soapberries don’t grow around Kitimat. If you want them, you have to trade for them. They look like cranberries, but can be squashed and whipped into a foam—Indian ice cream, uh’s in Haisla—which is mildly sweet but with a bitter, bitter aftertaste that takes some getting used to. Ma-ma-oo added a banana to hers to take some of the bitterness away, but the taste still made my eyes water. She’d brought back from Vancouver a case of soapberries that s
he’d traded for her oolichan grease, but otherwise she refused to talk about her trip. She had new medication, but as far as she was concerned, it had been a waste of time, she was healed.

  I wasn’t a big fan of uh’s. But Ma-ma-oo had whipped up a big bowl the night she came back, and I hated to insult her when she was already grouchy. She spooned a generous helping of uh’s into my bowl. The texture was slippery and oily. I shoveled them down to be done as quickly as possible. I’d never actually finished a whole bowl before.

  “Good, hey?” she said, pleased with the way I’d demolished her dish.

  I nodded. She picked up my bowl, but instead of putting it in the sink, added some more uh’s. I kept smiling. I had no idea how I was going to finish it. Ma-ma-oo practically licked her bowl clean. She waited for me to finish, sipping her tea. I hoped she would go to the bathroom, so I could pour it down the sink, but she sat and looked mildly into the distance. I made my way through the second bowl. I ate slower. Ma-ma-oo patted my hand. “We have enough for the whole winter,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  By the end of the week, I had become used to the taste. I didn’t even notice the bitterness any more. It was like whipped cream, but not as nauseatingly sweet as the canned stuff Mom bought.

  “What was Ba-ba-oo like?” I asked, sitting beside Ma-ma-oo on the couch.

  She shrugged. “Sherman was a good man.”

  “When did you fall in love with him?”

  She brushed the hair from my face. “He was thirteen, maybe fourteen. Your age.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Mom phoned and said it was time to come home. As I walked in the front door, she was in the hallway, smiling. She sat me down at the kitchen table where Dad was waiting. In cautious, practised calm, they told me I had an appointment at the hospital. Everything I told the shrink, they assured me, would be in complete confidence.