Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  “Chicken,” my dad said. He still seemed in a good mood.

  My mother put a trembling hand to her mouth and caught my eye. Then she pushed past him, took me by the arm, and we fled to the bedroom.

  The beatings weren’t the worst of it, though, as Quinn’s comment would imply. The worst were the times in between – the times when you didn’t know what would happen next – when maybe you could feel the trouble building inside the dusty house, ricocheting like an undercurrent off the crowded furniture. Instinct told you to run, and you did, but in the cold prairie winter in a musty little town where you had made no friends but everybody knew you as the son of the town drunk, how long could you stay away? People’s pity was just that, and you learned early not to mistake it for kindness. There may have been many who felt sorry for me but none who were willing to get involved.

  I notice Kit and Casey, crouched on their haunches with their tiny, bare toes pressed to the edge of the invisible line that keeps them out. They wait for the spell to be broken, for me to be released from my self-imposed exile and notice them. I’ve found that when I pay attention to their antics, they get overexcited and lose control. I try, for Joy’s sake, to be a good father. Or at least a good enough father. But I see it in their eyes, they’re guarded with me, already, at their young age; they seem to have learnt not to trust me.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” Casey used to shriek whenever I came in the door, running to show me some creation or to offer me a taste of whatever she was eating. After so many times of me pushing past her, saying, “Not now, Casey,” and, “Later, Casey,” she finally seems to have given up.

  I don’t want to dislike my own children, and for the most part I don’t. I’m just not certain I like them all that much. And I’m probably overstating that. After all, what parent doesn’t wonder at the innocent softness of their child’s sleeping face, the perfection of ten tiny digits? I’m not immune to all of it. It’s other times I can’t bear – their sorry hopefulness, their persistence. I have an unnatural dread of being left alone with them. Joy rarely asks it of me.

  In my drunken anger last night, I returned to the kitchen from the cool evening air of the backyard. I pushed through the people crowding my tiny house – writers and poets and their partners – making my way to the writing table where everyone knew not to touch the workspace or set their empty beer bottles. Sanctum sanctorum in the middle of chaos.

  It was then that I saw them, Joy and Quinn, standing in the small hallway. He leaned against the wall with his shoulder, and she did the same, facing him. She held a drink with both hands, twirling the glass in her fingers. There was something playful in the casual turn of the glass, the cock of her head. It looked off, somehow. Too much like flirting, it seemed to me. Even though she was turned away from me, I could tell she was smiling.

  I pushed my way to the writing table and grabbed the journals with my most recent notes, poems, sketches and outlines. The notebooks are where it all starts for me – where poems are born. Of course there is no copy of any of them. I stalked back through the kitchen and out to the yard, slamming the screen door carelessly. Into the fire pit I dumped the entire burden. Fumbling in my pockets for matches, I pictured Joy with Quinn. The congested papers wouldn’t light, and I was forced to handle them once again. As I tore and crumpled individual sheets, I averted my eyes from the inked words, the individual letters on the page – the little blue-black inflections, like stutters, t-t-tripping across the pages. I was afraid the sight of those letters, forming into words, might bring me to my senses.

  Joy sets a glass of water cautiously on the table near my papers. I grunt acknowledgement, and she shoos the kids away. I can see by her demeanour that she’s waiting for me to be finished. I have the intense urge, just then, to explain myself to her. The words I love you hover on my tongue, urgent, and yet I’m not able to say them out loud. I’m sorry. That’s what I want to convey. None of those silly girls, most of whose names I can’t recall, ever meant a thing to me. All drunken distractions. She knows that. I always thought she knew that.

  I would have liked for her and my mother to have known one another. It was after my mother died, and my father was drunk with an impossible regularity, that I made my way to the city. In my own drunken moment, at the party of an acquaintance from the Friday open mike, I spotted Joy across the room. I promptly walked up to her, mustered all the charm of a toad and blurted out Who the fuck are you? which, roughly deciphered, meant I’ve never seen you around here before. To my surprise, she was able to translate Drunken Asshole to English, and I went home with her that night.

  She found me last night, smoking my unfiltered cigarettes one after another, my last drink long gone, the papers in the fire pit reduced to smouldering brown ashes. I refused to acknowledge her touch on my back or to hold her hand when she slipped it into mine, irrationally blaming her for bringing the outed poet to our house. For making me burn my papers.

  Rather than go pick a fight with the poet, as I imagined would bring me satisfaction, I allowed myself instead to be led inside and put to bed like a child. The sensation of letting another man get the better of me in my own house dogged my dreams all night.

  I’ve been thinking about it all day, trying to make sense of what really happened last night. Before I know it, the shadows get long and the stereo begins playing the cool sounds of Chet Baker. She’s purposely chosen my favourite. A glass of wine appears on my table, and I emerge from my cocoon to see the kids leaping around the couch in their underwear. Joy enters with a cup in her hand and perches on the ottoman, ignoring them. She notices me watching her and lifts her arm, bearing a toast. In the twilight window frame I see the ill-formed beginnings of my own reflection, watered down as it is by the light of a near full moon.

  The look on Joy’s face is wry, as if she doesn’t quite believe in the toast herself. “To us,” the toast implies, but that look tells me it can’t deliver. Her look seems to question what the “us” is, any more. Or maybe these are just my own insecurities, projected onto her.

  I don’t know why, but I drop my pen and get out of my chair. I kneel on the floor in front of her and place my arms alongside her legs. My head falls into her lap. I can sense a moment where she hesitates even to touch me, there on my knees in front of her. I don’t cry, but I just stay there, head down, feeling her warm legs against my cheek and my ear.

  “What is it?” she asks, concerned. There’s a bit of an awkward laugh behind her words. The laugh tells me she’s afraid, afraid of what I’m going to say. Finally, she lays her free hand across my back, the other still holding her wine. “Vince?” she says, and then she repeats my name more insistently. “Vince!” She shakes my shoulder. “Vince, what have you done?”

  drinking wine spo dee o dee

  Hash, you tell a good story. You should write some of them down, you. People like that kind of thing.

  That’s what Sadie was always saying to me. Fucking Sadie. After she got on that bus, Roy and me each drank a whole bottle of Two-Buck Chuck in the bus station parking lot. That usually makes me sing the Spo Dee O Dee song, but I just wasn’t in the mood that time.

  I tried to act like I was happy she was going. She didn’t even look back. I called out Bitch! as the bus drove away. Then I almost had to pound some guy staring at me. Asshole. That got me and Roy kicked out of the station altogether. Roy passed out beside me, little Scruffy tucked in his shirt. It was another damn cold night.

  Fucking Sadie. Who goes from Winnipeg to Toronto anyway? I told her she’d find out. Being on the streets is a lot different in a big city like that. I told her when she came back, saying she’s sorry, that she was wrong, I wouldn’t be here waiting. But I guess we both knew that wasn’t true.

  Sadie only went to Toronto because she thought her kid was out there. She was thinking it was her last chance to find her, I guess. What the hell did she think she was going to do? Have some kind of happy reunion or something? What did she have to offer that kid, I asked her?
I wish I’d never said that to Sadie now.

  She was only out of the hospital two days before she left for Toronto. While she was in there, I waited for her every day, outside, for almost a whole week. Hospital staff wouldn’t let me in to see her. Not since the first day and the incident in her bathroom. How was I supposed to know the bathroom is only for patients? And what did I do all that waiting for, anyway? So she could take off on me? But I suppose she had a good reason.

  The day she got out, I was waiting for her, camped out near the doors, panhandling for change. Sadie always wore a black tube-style neck warmer on her head and I’d gotten used to the look of it, the way it stood straight up on her head, to make her look like a Russian Cossack dancer. But the day she came out of the hospital, I noticed she’d gotten hold of a large yellow metal binder paperclip and clipped the top of the neck warmer shut in the middle, at the top of her head, making it look, more than ever, like just a toque. I was disappointed that she no longer looked like a Russian dancer, but I did like the yellow paperclip against the black fabric of the neck warmer. It was the first thing I noticed when she came out the hospital doors.

  “Sadie,” I yelled at the yellow paperclip, bobbing away on top of her head. She didn’t see me there when she came out, sitting next to the door with my back against the building. I jumped up, scooping up my cup with its bits of change and the piece of cardboard that I’d been sitting on, and trotted along to catch up with her. She looked back when I called her name, but she was determined not to slow down.

  “Well?” I asked, finally catching up to her.

  Sadie ignored me and kept walking.

  “Where’s the fucking fire?” I asked, looking around to see if she was being chased. Maybe she was AWOL from the hospital, I thought. But no one was following us. I knew she’d come around and talk to me, sooner or later, so I just walked with her. “Roy and Scruff are over at the library,” I told her.

  “So?” she asked.

  So this is how it’s going to go, I thought to myself.

  “We got enough for a bottle. We’ll celebrate you getting out of the hospital, hey?”

  Sadie’s steps slowed a bit. We walked some more. I could tell Sadie was warm to the idea of a bottle.

  I heard the footsteps, running behind us, more than one person. I should’ve realized what was coming, but I didn’t think anything of those running steps until it was too late. They were right on us, and then Sadie started fucking screaming at the same time as one of the little punks grabbed the yellow paperclip and pulled her hat off her head. The pricks kept running down the sidewalk, whooping and hollering, swinging Sadie’s hat in the air. When they threw it and it landed on the sidewalk, they kicked it along like a soccer ball.

  Sadie ran a bit down the street, screaming at the boys. “You! You! You!” she kept repeating, not able to spit out the rest of what she wanted to say.

  I ran after the boys for a block, which made them laugh louder, but they kept running, throwing catcalls over their shoulders.

  “Come and get it, Grandpa,” they taunted.

  “Yeah?” I shouted back. “Fuck you.” Grandpa. What the fuck?

  Finally, they left the hat on the sidewalk and took off. I walked the last block to get it, snatching it up and turning around to go back to where I’d left Sadie. By the time I got there, she was leaning against one of the buildings, having a coughing fit. She tried to hide the bloody napkin she was coughing into, but I saw it plain as anything.

  Sadie never talked too much about her life, except when she was drinking and she got into that funky mood. Her eyes would go glassy and the tears would leak like someone was fiddling around with a tap. Those times, she would tell me how much she loved me, how she couldn’t live without me. Those were good times, those.

  One of those times, she told me about the baby.

  “I feel it, sometimes,” she said to me. And when I didn’t say anything, she said, “My uncle, he had a leg amputated, from diabetes. After it was gone, he swore he could still feel that leg. Sometimes it was itchy. Sometimes it hurt. And he’d go to scratch it or rub it, and it wasn’t there. There was nothing for him to scratch or rub. Phantom pain, that’s what he called it.” She paused and then said, “That’s what I got. Phantom pain. That baby grew here.” She thumped her ribs. “And sometimes I still feel it there. I swear, I feel it kicking me, nudging me from the inside. Like it wants to remind me – so I won’t forget about it.” She paused. “I never looked, you know?” she said to me, her eyes searching my face to see if I understood. Then she added, “I never looked at my baby to see if it was a boy or a girl. And nobody told me.”

  “I went home after that. Home free. Empty handed. I was supposed to act like it didn’t happen. I always had a feeling it was a girl, so that’s how I think of her now. A little orphan girl.”

  “After I got home, I stayed in my room a long time. The first time I dared to go out, with my friends, I went out to a party. A house party. I got a bottle of vodka that night. I tipped my head back with that bottle and I drank and drank. I didn’t know how to drink hard liquor; I never had it before. I let it burn my throat and my sinuses, it felt good to hurt myself that way. I kept wondering how come no one noticed I was bleeding. Course I wasn’t, really. I just felt like it.”

  Another time she told me, “I could have done it. I could have. We’d have been poor, but so what? There’s worse things for a kid than growing up poor.”

  After the coughing fit, I fixed Sadie’s hat on her head. While we walked to meet up with Roy, Sadie explained to me why she had to go to Toronto. “I imagine her wearing her life like a lie,” she said. “Slipping in and out of crowds of people and going completely unnoticed. No one knows who she is because she don’t know herself. How will she know who she is?” Sadie pleaded. “I dream she has one memory again and again – the memory of my heart beating out a message to her. I want her to know she’s not alone.”

  And so Sadie went on the bus and left me here with Roy. My good friend Roy.

  “I hate Winnipeg,” Roy says, rubbing his hands together, stomping his feet. “The coldest fucking city in the world, or some shit like that.”

  We’re outside the Louis Riel, hoping to get some change. I put little Scruffy under my arm and hold the cup out at a woman passing through the doors into the hotel. As if on cue, Scruff gives a small whine.

  “Sparesomechange?” I ask. She pauses – a good sign. A couple of coins hit the bottom of the cup and I say, “God bless.” She grimaces and goes into the hotel, avoiding eye contact.

  “Fuck, it’s cold,” Roy says.

  “Dat reminds me of a joke,” I say. “A drunk sits in a bar and watches a guy walk in. The guy sits beside the prettiest girl there. Pretty soon, they get up and leave together. Next night, same thing happens. The drunk watches as the guy scores, night after night.”

  Roy’s still dancing around in his work boots, rubbing his hands together, but he’s watching me with a smile.

  “Finally, the drunk can’t stand it,” I continue. “He goes up to that guy and asks him for his secret. ‘How do you get all those women to go with you?’ he asks. The guy says, ‘Okay, first thing you do is go up to a woman and say, Tickle your ass with a feather. If she acts good to that, then you go from there. If she says, What!? you say, Typical nasty weather. You got it?’ The drunk nods his head and stumbles away to find himself a lady to try this on.”

  Roy’s smiling now. He takes Scruff from me and puts the pup under his coat to keep him warm. “Keep talkin’,” he says.

  “So the drunk, he sits down beside a woman at the bar and he says, ‘Scratch your cunt with a twig.’ She says, ‘What!?’ and he says, ‘FUCK it’s cold.’”

  Sadie liked me telling stories. “It’s how we know who we are,” she was always saying, whatever that meant. But my stories are different than Sadie’s. Sadie’s stories are older than mine – they’re about where she comes from, her whole family, like. Ancestors and shit like that. Mine ar
e just life stories. Jokes and life stories.

  Hey, I got a story from my life. Most of the people around here don’t know about it, but me and Roy, we used to be part of something big, something historic, us. Did you ever hear of AIM? Red Power and all that. American Indian Movement. Yeah, well we were there. We were there on the front lines at Wounded Knee, down in South Dakota, getting our asses kicked along with all those other Indians.

  It was really something, all those Indians in one place, standing up for our rights. That’s how it went back then. We done a lot of scrapping, a lot of fighting, ‘cause we knew what we wanted and we knew what was right.

  We watched the seasons turn there at Wounded Knee. Something like seventy-two days. A baby was born there, a spring baby. I wonder sometimes where that baby is today. He must be at least thirty years old now, him. Older, even. God, was it that long ago? I wonder if he’s a warrior, like his mom must have been.

  We were all warriors then, us, to be at Wounded Knee, taking on the fucking US army. Women, children, babies. No one was afraid. You’re talking about a bunch of people with nothing to lose. That’s how revolution works – when people got nothing to lose.

  On our way into the camp, we had to try not to get fucking shot by those moonias people who were pissed off about the roads being closed and all those army guys being around. They were taking pot shots at the Indians from the hills along the highway.

  In the end there, I was one of the ones who got arrested. Me and Roy. When those soldiers took me down, I was running with my guts in my throat, I never ran so scared. I honestly thought if they got me I’d be dead. I’d already seen two other Indians die over those seventy days. One of them, he was shot by a fucking machine gun.

  I saw other things too. Like when twelve people left from the camp to go for supplies. Gonna pack them in on foot, through what they call there the “badlands.” Not one of those guys came back. I never heard of anyone finding out what happened to those guys. People talked about a mass grave and stuff, out in the desert, but I never heard if that was true, me.