by Rose Christo
"Hush kacker!" the old lady yelled.
Jona got out a sitting stool for her and she sat heavily. She reached under her veil and pulled out a series of colored silk ribbons. I thought of Cree ribbon gowns, Cree ribbon shirts. She tied the ribbons together with ancient, skillful fingers. Jona sat on the edge of the plush purple bed, his hand on my knee.
"She's making a mulengi dori," he said. "Wait."
The old woman tied a thick gold coin to the very end of the ribbon thread. She let it swing between her fingers, like a pendulum. I wondered if she was trying to hypnotize me. After a moment's silence she started talking in Rromanes, her voice reedy, but soothing. I wanted to know what she was saying. I nudged Jona and he started.
"The mamioro," he explained. "She has to send them away."
"The what?" I asked.
"Mamioro. They're like the spirits of illness. She'll send them away, but they'll come back. She has to figure out why."
"Hush kacker!" the drabani said again.
None of this made much sense to me. I tried to settle down but my skin was hot and crawling and restless. I wished the night would come and go so I could run to Rabbit, so I could take him home.
The drabani let the ribbon pendulum fall on her lap. She cupped it in her leathery hands. She spoke back and forth with Jona for a while and he translated for me, haltingly.
"Someone's memory is making you sick," Jona told me, puzzled. "It's covering you like a cloud."
I gave the drabani a dull look. She returned it with a sneer, only her pinched eyes visible above her veil. Unless Someone's Memory was code word for Atom Bomb I couldn't say I agreed with her professional opinion.
"You've been sick on the inside for a long time," Jona went on. "Now it's on the outside because the mamioro found you. She can send the mamioro away, but unless you heal your memory they're going to come back."
The drabani said something more and Jona listened quietly. When she was finished he asked me:
"Do you share your name with someone?"
I hesitated. "What do you mean?"
"Your name," Jona said. "Are you named for someone? Someone you try not to think about?"
My head was killing me. The room looked darker than it was supposed to, my eyes coated in water.
"No," I said.
"Kek," Jona said to the woman.
"Hokka," the woman said, staring at me.
"You too," I said.
"She wants you to make peace," Jona said distantly. "Make peace with your memory."
The drabani got up and left. The door slapped shut behind her, swallowing the sun outside. The stuffiness of the scented curtains clashed with the dull heat from the whale oil lantern.
"She's crazy," Jona said, in a hollow voice. "I can't believe I forgot how crazy our old people are."
A small silence wedged its way between us. It was the kind of silence that said what Jona didn't. Even a crazy old mystic didn't have an answer for radiation poisoning.
"Jona," I began.
"Don't," he warned me.
"When I die," I said, "I want you to look after Rabbit. That way you both have somebody."
"Please don't," he said. "Please don't."
I took his face in my hands and kissed him. Hot tears wet my face. I didn't know which one of us they belonged to. I kissed him, again and again, so we wouldn't have to find out.
* * * * *
Jona worked himself into such a state of distress he fell asleep tangled in my arms, his face damp, his fingers twitching while he dozed. I held him tight so he wouldn't have room to scratch himself. He dozed fitfully, waking and sleeping, murmuring my name even when his eyes were sealed shut. I kissed him when he woke, when he slept, and he burrowed into me, so afraid I could feel it in his taut shoulders, in his shivering arms. Was this what loss did to a person? Was this what it looked like to lose everyone you ever loved? His sister's name was Tchalai. It meant Bright Star, he'd told me once. She was named for their mother who told fortunes, who loved their father, a very serious man who didn't know what it meant to smile. His brothers were twins but they didn't look alike. His brothers, his mother, his father, his sister. Now me.
"Devlesa araklam tume," Jona muttered.
I couldn't tell whether he was awake or asleep. I pressed his shoulder to find out. His eyes slid open, whites bloodshot, lashes damp. Even in pain he was so beautiful. I kissed his eyelashes, sweet with salt. I kissed his smooth eyebrows and the curved bump of his nose. I kissed his waiting mouth and he breathed into me, the saddest sigh I'd ever tasted.
"Don't leave," he said. "Don't leave me."
I pressed his shoulders into the mattress. I kissed everywhere I could think of, his cheeks, his chin, his hair. He held onto me, his arms around my back, his legs around my waist. I reached under his buttoned shirt, spread my hand open across his stomach. He pressed his hips against mine and I knew he wanted me inside of him, the same way I knew I wanted to be inside of him.
"I love you," I whispered into Jona's ear. "I love you."
I undressed him and made love to him and he hid his face on my shoulder, arms and legs wrapped tight around me, clipped fingernails breaking the skin on my back. I tried to pretend that this wasn't the last time. I tried to pretend I wasn't saying goodbye.
* * * * *
Jona was asleep when I pulled the thick quilt over him. I kissed his round shoulders, his steep collarbone, his messy mouth, all as lightly as I knew how. I would have liked to curl into the warmth of him, to sleep for a century at his side. I got up and dressed instead. It was nighttime. I hoped that Yazma was back at the kumpania, that she had news about my son.
I went outside the vardo and checked that the door was shut tight. I climbed down the ladder and onto the park grounds. This had to be an abandoned park, I thought, because the Gypsies were still camped here, and no one had arrested them for squatting. Kindling fires decorated the dry grounds and young teenagers sat around them, whispering. Men sat on the wagon yokes, gifting each other with their hard-earned money. I sat under the trembling leaves of a Burr oak, watching a group of children play tag.
Yazma shuffled over to me in a thin pair of rope sandals. She sat down at my side, a cigarette in her mouth. I wanted to grab it and put it out, but maybe I didn't have that right.
"Take the Nelson River to Little Playgreen Lake," Yazma said. "That's where Norway House is."
"Thank you," I said. A dam broke inside of me. "Thank you, Yazma."
"Do you want to smoke?" she asked.
"Where are your parents?" I asked her.
She smelled of sweat, of exhaustion. I probably smelled the same. How we got that way wasn't even remotely similar. It didn't escape me. It bothered me.
"The Porajmos took them," Yazma said. She didn't sound bothered. People will fool you if you let them.
"Come with us," I said. "As soon as we get my son we're taking him home. You don't have to live this way. If you come with us we can take care of you."
Yazma's eyes were as blue as a baby's. They widened at my suggestion. She drew a sharp breath.
"You think you're my babu," Yazma said.
"I don't know what that is," I said.
"You're a father. You see some kid with a cigarette and your brain goes crazy. You don't even know her. You want to take her in, like she's a stray."
"You are a stray," I said. "There's no shame in that."
"What life is a Gadje life? To sit in one place, never moving. Walking People have no home."
"Jona told me that," I said. "The way I figure, you have no home because you've never been allowed to."
Yazma paused. "True enough," she said, and breathed into her cigarette.
I waited for her decision.
"Did you know," Yazma said, a coil of smoke escaping her mouth, "that you can't save everyone?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She drew her knees to her chest and said, "I'm just one of many. If you rescue me from the trash heap who's left? Some
one's left. Will you want to save them, too? How many hands do you have, babu? Not as many hands as there are hungry children on this planet."
Cold dread unraveled in my veins, in my stomach.
"Your rromoro's going to miss you when you're gone," Yazma said quietly. There wasn't any malice in it.
"Are you talking about Jona?" I asked.
"You don't have any rromanipen. Maybe that's why..."
"I don't know what that means."
"You don't have to. God knows these things."
"How do you trust in God?" I asked. "After everything you've seen?"
Yazma put out her cigarette on the ground. She had eyes like fresh rain, a face like a little girl's.
"I don't," she said. "I never will."
* * * * *
The next morning I left the kumpania with Jona. The guy who made me think of a jelly doughnut tried to get us to take a vardo with us, one of the mules. I wasn't sure about it, but Jona was the one who refused. He was so terrified of anything Cigani, anything Lovari or Lalleri or Dom, he would rather have cut off his own arm, tattoo and all, than be found out by the rest of the world for what he really was.
"Nelson River," Jona muttered feverishly. "I don't think that's far away..."
We had to climb the park gates to get back out to the turnpike. When I dropped to the ground a spark of pain shot through my ankle, up into my knee. I bit back a grimace. My stomach bubbled with nausea. I hoped it was just the mariki.
"How did they get their wagons in there?" I asked Jona. We walked alongside the road, an early morning sun coloring the asphalt in shades of warm tea. "If the park is all fenced in."
"Gypsies have their ways," Jona said. "Sometimes it's better not to ask how."
We walked the caked, dried soil and I thought of my father. I didn't like to think of my father. He had to be about fifty now, maybe fifty-one. Where had he gone? Where did he live these days? There were Cree in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec. Cree who managed to hide out in the US, on Turtle Mountain and Prior Lake. Dad wasn't among them. He couldn't be. Ask him and he'd tell you he wasn't an Indian. You could scrub the Indian right out of a boy's heart and soul. Too bad you couldn't scrub it off his skin.
"We should visit Two-Ply," Jona murmured. "When you get better."
I made myself smile at him. "Sure," I said.
I tossed the leather sack over my shoulder. The handgun ammunition rattled inside.
* * * * *
The Nelson River was as blue as frozen lips. We followed it to the salt flats and I shivered. When the gray clouds moved in the white sky they reflected on the smooth and colorless ground. It was dizzying, like there was no earth beneath our feet. Jona knelt down and tried to unearth some of the salt. He chipped at it with a box cutter until it came away in his hand, powdery and white. His tanned palm turned raw and red.
"I've never seen anything like this," Jona said.
I had. I thought of the first time I saw a beluga whale. I was six years old and it swam right up to the Arctic inlet. It nestled its pudgy head on the snowy shore. It was whiter than snow, whiter than God. I yanked my longline out of the thawing waters, startled by the sudden appearance.
"Ah, don't be a wimp," Dad said. "What do you think this island is named for?"
The beluga puffed cold air through its blowhole. I looked skittishly from the whale to my father. My father sat cross-legged on top of the bait box, his cigarette in his mouth.
"Wapu," he said slowly, like I was an idiot. "Means Whale." He reached beside him for a tackle. "Go on, touch it."
I reached out with a tentative hand, stroked the side of the beluga whale's head. He chirped at me and I relaxed. I thought he was kind of like a sea bird, a siren.
"You really are a dumb kid," Dad said, but chuckled. I couldn't tell the difference between his cold breath and the cigarette smoke. "I wanted to give you a good, strong name. A real name, you know? Ted or James or Anthony."
I fixed the bait on my longline hooks. I nicked myself. Dad got up and strode over, grabbed my hand and checked it out.
"You're fine," he said. He blew warm breath on my bleeding finger. "You know how to say orca whale in Cree?"
I thought it was a trap. Dad didn't like it when we spoke Cree.
"Wapumak," Dad said. "We've got more damn words for whales than most languages have letters."
"It sounds like Rabbit," I said.
"Don't be stupid," Dad said. "Rabbit is Wapos."
We sat together on the bait box. The beluga whale dipped back into the water and swam away. The rushing tide was lyrical when it lapped over the snow. I looked out into the stark white ocean and imagined it went on forever. Small as I was, the vastness overwhelmed me.
"White whales," Dad said suddenly. "They sing the song of the world. From the moment of the Great Fire to the birth of Turtle Island. You can hear the whole world in their song."
"What song?" I asked him.
I was young and full of stupid questions. And maybe that's why he answered me.
"Omisimaw Pesim, iyana he ne," he sang. A peyote song. "Sakastowa, kikisepa, iyana he ne."
The ocean held still for him. The breathy clouds, the squeaking snow quails all held still. Dad had never sung before. He had never sung in Cree.
"Don't you tell anyone," Dad warned me, like our lives depended on it. "Don't you tell anyone I know that song."
* * * * *
White whales sing the history of the whole world. Human beings used to sing it with them. It was only when we split ourselves into nations and tribes and enemies that we forgot the ancient lyrics. It was only when we became white man, black man, brown man that we stopped being white whales.
My father's name was Wapu Mikushtui. In Cree it means White Whale. He hated himself for it. He was only ever able to be half the thing he wanted to be. The White part he didn't mind. It was the Whale part he couldn't shake off. No matter how short he cut his hair, no matter how cuffed he wore his shirt sleeves, his name was not Ted or Anthony or James. Nothing could change the fact that he spoke the language of the whales. Nothing could change the fact that he understood their mournful underwater song.
Omisimaw Pesim, iyana he ne. Sakastowa, kikisepa, iyana he ne.
Sister Sun, we wait for you. In the morning, should you rise, we'll wait for you.
We were a Plains People banished to the polar darkness. We were a Sun People. We couldn't last long without our Sun.
We wouldn't last long.
No wonder the White Whale swam away. He didn't really have a choice.
* * * * *
That night Jona and I slept beside the Nelson River watershed. I liked being out in the open, out underneath the moving stars. I made sure Jona had a star blanket around him, a star blanket under his head. They were my mother's star blankets. I didn't tell him that.
By morning we reached Little Playgreen Lake, which was neither little nor green. I thought it kind of weird that there were no towns nearby, no railroads, not even a solitary truck stop. It should have been my first warning.
"That must be the school," Jona said. Hands in his pockets, he nodded at the squat building on the opposite lakeshore, gray and blurry and fenced in.
It was only when we drew nearer that I realized: The fence was barbed wire. My heart dropped all the way in my stomach. Jona shot me a sideways look, unreadable. I got the revolvers out of the leather sack, loaded the chambers, gave one to Jona. I put mine on my belt and he did the same.
It was like we were in the army all over again. We ducked when we ran to the back fence, pressed low to the ground and took cover by a water pump. I wished we had an M3 scope. Milk used to be good with those. Inside the fence the ground was raw cement, like a penitentiary courtyard. A couple of men stood chatting by the back door. There was no mistaking their uniform for anything but prison personnel. My heart jumped out of my stomach and into my throat and threatened to tear out of my neck. This wasn't a school. This wasn't a school and my son was locked inside.
>
Jona gestured with two fingers and we crept away from the water pump. When we were out of earshot of the prison we started the brisk walk back to the watershed. Jona's fingers twitched; and for the first time mine did the same. I'd never wanted to kill anyone before. I wanted to kill now.
"Do we have anything we can use for a silencer?" Jona wanted to know.
"Water bottles," I said.
"We brought masking tape?"
"Why is my son in a prison?"
Jona grabbed my elbows. The sun was weak and high and the salt flats were shining, blinding. Norway House was a blot on the horizon.
"I'll get us in," Jona said. "And then we'll get him, and we'll go home."
"We can't go home," I said.
He realized it, too. If my son was a prisoner and we broke in and made off with him that made all three of us fugitives. Fugitives. That didn't make sense. Six-year-olds weren't supposed to be prisoners. It didn't make sense.
"Then we'll be Walking People," Jona said. "The three of us. We'll be Walking People. We don't need a home."
* * * * *
We spent the afternoon on the far side of Little Playgreen Lake, ripping up empty water bottles and taping the plastic around the mouths of the revolvers. The main thing about silencers is that they eat up all the gunsmoke before it escapes the barrel. My hands were shaking and Jona noticed. Now and again he took my hand and grasped it until it stilled.
By evening we were back outside Norway House, watching the guards, learning their routines. The real hassle was that they never left their station open. When they swapped shifts they always waited for the replacement to show up before they left through the back door. I couldn't see any way around it: If we wanted to get inside the building, someone had to die.
Night fell and the moon came out. We leapt up from our position just as the replacement guard came out the door and locked it. Jona shot the guy in the chest, in the throat, and he crumpled silently. I got the box cutter out of our bag and knelt down and cut the bottom of the fence. It was one of those concertina types, the bottom chain linked, the top whorling with spikes.