Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  So I’m running from the soldiers, the taste of iron in my mouth, pumping my arms and my boots slippery on the hard ground. I didn’t look back because I knew looking would slow me down. That and I didn’t want to see the fucker that was going to shoot me. Any minute I knew I’d hear a gun crack.

  And then I did hear it. I stumbled and fell, sucking that dusty grey-shit dirt through my front teeth. They gave me a licking with the boots and rifle butts until I went unconscious. I woke up in the back of a truck, handcuffed, bleeding; Roy was sitting near me and we were headed for jail.

  That time with AIM, that wasn’t my first time in jail. First time I went to jail was when I met Roy. I was fresh as dew, me. I can imagine how I must have looked – bony shoulders sticking out, little tough guy, scrappy, big-eyed, fresh and tender baby meat. Six-fucking-teen.

  If it wasn’t for Crow I’d have been torn apart inside a week.

  Who’s the punk, Crow?

  Fuck you, he’s my nephew.

  Didn’t anyone ever tell you that’s fuckin’ incest?

  Laughter.

  But nobody fucked with my uncle Crow.

  “Don’t you let no one in here call you that, nephew,” Crow told me later. “Punk,” he said, when I looked confused. “You don’t wanna wear that jacket. You hear?” To be somebody’s punk was to be his girlfriend. Jail’s the only fucked up place I know where forcing another guy to suck your dick proves you’re a man.

  I seen it happen to another guy. Little moonias kid, same age as me. I can still remember his name was Adrian. We met in the buckets, were on the same bus ride out, and we hit the block together. First-time offenders.

  The cop at the holding cells looked real hard at him and me. Then he said, “You going to the Pen?” When we said yes, he shook his head, mocking us with his tsk, tsking, and walked away, grinning. The bastard. He saw how fresh we were.

  It didn’t take long – that kid Adrian was turned out by his cellmate inside of two days. You could hear him pleading with the guy. I asked Crow why nobody done anything to stop it, and he said they don’t even patrol the blocks after lockdown.

  We were on the same work crew for a while, me and Adrian.

  “Heya, Adrian,” I said to him one day. Just being friendly was all.

  His rake stopped moving. His head stayed down, and he stood like he was frozen. It took a couple of minutes for me to see he was fucking crying.

  “What the fuck’s the matter?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Fucking quit it, before someone sees you,” I said, looking around.

  Then he said, without looking up, “You’re the first person to say my name since I got here. My name is Adrian. I’m not a fucking punk.” Then he started raking again and moved away from me.

  Like I said, Sadie’s stories were different. Bigger, somehow. Larger than just one person’s life. Sadie, she told me about her uncle telling her a story once about a giant that lived on the reserve. A giant and a weasel. That weasel, he ate the giant’s heart out there, at the end of that story. They’re fast and sneaky there, them weasels. That’s how that story went. I know how the old people’s stories work, how they’re told over and over because kids don’t really listen. It takes lots of times to hear the story before you remember it.

  Sadie said that time with her uncle was different. It was special to have him tell the story in his slow way that made a person hang on to the end of each word, waiting to see if there would be more. I knew just what she meant when she said that. She didn’t dare breathe because it might make him stop.

  When Sadie’s uncle finished his story, she said there was no way to get him to tell another one. Instead, he went outside for a smoke. Seven months after that, he was dead from the cancer.

  “He didn’t tell any more stories after that time,” Sadie said. “Think about it. All the stories he didn’t tell. Just gone.”

  The more I think about it, the more I see that Sadie was right, it’s all about the stories.

  Beside me, Roy cracks his knuckles, a habit that gives me the willies. I first heard him do it in jail that first time. After I hit the block, it didn’t take long before this guy, a big halfbreed with a rep, started to fuck with me. Just a little at first, he’d bump me in the food line and whisper Cousin in my ear, or stare me down in the chow hall.

  Crow’s advice was important. Someone gets in your face, you fight back. Don’t let nobody fuck with you.

  One night, four weeks into my sentence, I go to get a coffee and the big halfbreed takes my spot. He takes my spot and then turns away from me and starts joking around with those guys at the table. Only he’s not just joking around, he’s cracking his knuckles, loud and aggressive-like.

  I’m not your fucking babysitter, my uncle Crow’s voice echoed.

  So while I’m at the coffee counter I put my hand in my front pocket, feeling for the smooth metal, warm next to my leg, which is shaking. I palm the combination lock, looping the string that’s tied to it around my hand. Then I turn around, ready to come back to my seat, my arm stiff at my side. The big halfbreed’s still turned away from me, on purpose, pretending it’s not a challenge, him taking my seat.

  You want to make it in here? Draw blood, hurt somebody, get a rep for being crazy – that’s what you gotta do.

  I could let it go, could find myself another seat. But I know the price of not sticking up for myself. So I wait until I’m close before I break with two strong steps, drop my coffee and bring my straight right arm around, my whole hundred and thirty pounds behind the blow with the lock that catches him on the temple.

  His head, it goes all the way down, and on the bounce back up I clock him with the lock to the back of the scalp. I hit him so many times I lose count. The string finally breaks, and the lock falls. I look at my unconscious halfbreed friend, blood pouring from his scalp, soaking his hair, dripping from the ends like water.

  “Cousin,” I say out loud.

  A week later, when I see the big halfbreed for the first time since the attack, I’m ready for trouble. The bruises on his face have faded, yellowed around the edges. The whites of both eyes are still blood red, but even they’ve started to turn yellow. His eyes, with the broken blood vessels like that, make him look fierce. But it’s not like I thought, with him. Instead of pulling a knife on me, he pulls a deck of cards.

  “Play,” he says menacingly, holding up the well-worn deck and nodding to an empty table.

  Okay, I think, as he deals out a hand of whist, me wondering all the time what his game is. Any time a guy tries to sit down at the table and join the game, the halfbreed says, “We’re fucking busy here,” and stares the guy down until he backs off.

  “Someone’s gonna think we’re on a date,” I say, and he looks at me sharply. Then he laughs out loud, shuffling the cards.

  I win the game in four hands, and he puts the cards in his pocket and stands up. He’s still got one hand in his pocket and I watch that hand, bracing myself for what’s going to come next. My calf muscles are tense under my seat as I lean my weight onto my toes, ready to spring up and defend myself.

  But instead of attacking me, the halfbreed just says, “We’ll play again tomorrow.”

  Twice more we play cards before I figure out he’s maybe not as menacing as I thought. Then he starts sitting with me at mealtime. At first, I think he’s trying to power me out. But he don’t do anything, just sits. And that’s how it goes, for my whole sentence. When we got out of the Pen, we just kept on hanging around together, me and my halfbreed friend.

  I poke Roy and pass him the bottle. “Cousin,” I say.

  Roy shifts on his cardboard and sleeping bag. “Fuck, it’s cold,” he says.

  “Scratch your cunt with a twig,” I say, and we both laugh.

  Roy rubs his hand over his face, and his thumb grazes the spot near his temple where that scar is. He tips his head back to drink out of the bottle. You can still read most of the word MASTER imprinted there, backwards and lopside
d, if you look at it in the light. We’ve had a laugh or two about that over the years, me and my fucking halfbreed friend.

  We should go to the shelter tonight, but they have rules about us drinking. Good old Two-Buck Chuck. Drinkin’ wine spo dee o dee. Wish I knew a sad song, me.

  “Hey, Cousin,” I say, “wanna go to the Fort Garry there and watch those rich moonias people pretending to be broke?”

  “Ehhh,” Roy says, putting the tip of his tongue on his bottom front teeth, like Indians do, as if to say, Good joke. And then we laugh, which helps to warm us up. At the Fort Garry, we panhandle enough for another bottle and then, like a gift, the weather breaks.

  A few days later, me and Roy are outside the bus station after a pretty good afternoon at the hotel there. We’re feeling alright about things just then. A car full of Indians pulls up to the curb, and two people get out. I’m thinking about whether or not to ask them for money before I see that it’s Sadie’s family, her brother and a cousin. They’ve come to find me, something I know right away ain’t good.

  Her brother shakes my hand. “Hash.” He says my name like I’m an old friend. He offers me a smoke. Roy goes inside with Sadie’s cousin. We stand around near the wall of the bus station, me and Sadie’s brother, dragging on our smokes, not sure what to say to each other. We both look up and down the street as if this will help. Neither of us wants to look too hard at the other. I have the feeling I don’t want to know what he’s come here to say.

  “How you been?” I ask.

  “Okay,” he answers. He nods his head a bit, his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans. “Yep. I been okay.”

  We’re both silent for a while.

  “Got a call,” he says finally.

  I nod.

  “It’s Sadie,” he says. “She died.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know that.” Even while my voice stays the same, talking to Sadie’s brother there, everything inside me changes.

  “Oh,” he says. Then he adds, “You didn’t, hey.” He nods his head some more, drags on his smoke before saying, “She’s in Toronto – her body. We’re gonna have a funeral there. It’s where we’re from, you know.”

  I nod again, just as though we’re talking about something ordinary. My ears buzz and it’s sort of crazy, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

  I let him tell me some more stuff, about how she died on the bus before she even got to Toronto and nobody noticed until they got to the Toronto station and everyone got off and the driver checked the seats. She was already long gone by the time he found her. “Natural causes,” Sadie’s brother says. The discussion ends with him giving me money for a bus ticket, so I can go.

  Later, I say to Roy, “That was nice. Him making a point of finding me. Yup.”

  I took the money and all. Roy and me even went in to buy that ticket there. Then I thought, How can I get on that bus? I’d have to wonder which seat she was in. Did she look out the window here? Did she see that same shack out there in the field; did she watch those same shadows sliding around over the snatches of snow? Where was it that old Wesakechak played his last big trick on her? Was it just outside TO where she quietly stopped breathing as the bus churned up the dust on the road? How could I get on that bus and have all them thoughts, me?

  Instead, me and Roy drink up the money. You probably guessed that. But after, I start to have second thoughts. I start to wonder what’s the right thing to do and I think maybe, maybe I’ll still have to get on that bus. Maybe after it warms up. When the seasons change again. Find that kid, tell her Sadie’s story.

  Sadie would like that kind of shit.

  hungry

  When Lucy Wingfeather was small, she lived with her real mother, where she was kept, for a time, in the basement, on account of being bad. A puppy came to the basement one day, and Lucy reasoned that he must have been bad too. He came to her, to the place where she stayed in the corner with the blankets and old clothes. He was soft all over and warm and wiggly. His black fur was like velvet. Lucy wanted to hold him but he squirmed away, scratching her with his small sharp nails.

  “Jesus!” she said. She clutched his rump but he squealed and scared her, so she let him go. He ran to the bottom of the stairs and started to cry. Too small to climb the stairs, he just stood at the bottom and whined. Lucy wondered why he didn’t like her.

  “Shhhh,” Lucy hissed, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. She called to him in whispers. Lucy could tell the puppy didn’t know how bad it was to cry at the stairs like that. Lucy stayed in the corner. There was only one small window in the basement and it was by the stairs. The puppy could be seen in the light that came in through the window; he whined and looked up the stairs. Lucy, still mad at him for not staying with her, threw things at him to try to get him to quit.

  After a while, the puppy figured out how to get up onto the first step. Once up, he couldn’t get down. He cried even more. Lucy wanted to go and help him but she was too afraid. A little while later, he made it up one more step, where he curled up and fell asleep.

  Later, Lucy consoled herself with the thought that she tried to tell the puppy. Lucy knew bad things happened if you cried by the steps. Stupid puppy, she thought.

  The puppy was still asleep on the second step when Lucy’s mother, with her heavy steps and hard-landing heels, was heard on the floor overhead, moving to the door at the top of the stairs. Lucy held her breath when her mother came thumping down the stairs. It only took one of those heavy heel strikes in the centre of the puppy’s back to break it. Puppy made a terrible noise.

  “Jesus,” Lucy’s mother cried, surprised, crashing down the remaining two steps before she caught her balance. Still holding Lucy’s plate of supper in one hand, Lucy’s mother leaned over to examine the crushed puppy. “Stupid little bastard,” she said.

  She set Lucy’s plate in the usual spot on the counter beside the stairs before turning to clomp back up, avoiding the puppy, which was making small, awful noises. Lucy was so afraid of the noises that she didn’t dare go near her supper plate. In the morning, when the sun came in through the little window, the noises had stopped and Lucy could see the still curve of soft black fur on the step.

  After the strangers came to get Lucy out of the basement, Lucy was sent to a series of foster homes. The longest foster home stay was Lucy’s last one – she made it almost to the end of grade eight. On her first day at her last foster home, Billy, the real kid of the foster parents, took her into his parents’ bedroom and showed her a cupboard with piles and piles of porno magazines. “Look,” he said, flipping a magazine open and showing her pictures of two girls kissing. “What do you think of that?”

  Lucy didn’t know what she thought about it but could tell Billy thought something about it, and he wanted some kind of reaction from her. By then, she’d learned a thing or two about when to give boys what they wanted and when not to.

  “So?” she said, in the face of the dirty magazine. “Who cares about that?”

  When his mother came in and caught them looking in the cupboard, the first words out of Billy’s mouth were, “She made me.”

  By the time she was in grade eight, Lucy knew too well what Billy thought about the pictures in his dad’s magazines and how he expected her to respond.

  The day she saw the group of boys from her grade eight class at the school playground, Lucy didn’t turn to go a different way. She wasn’t afraid of them. The opposite, in fact. Lucy had wanted to have a boyfriend since she was in grade seven. She sometimes dreamed so vividly that Davis Anderson, the most popular boy in grade eight, had asked her to “go out” with him that she had to remind herself that it wasn’t real when she woke up. She imagined how her life would be different if she got herself a boyfriend. A real boyfriend that is. Billy didn’t count.

  The boys waited until she walked right into the playground and stood by the fort before they paid any attention to her. It was the school’s new playground and it was supposed to be some ki
nd of a boat, although Lucy could never see the resemblance. It was officially named the “Friend Ship.” The boys were all in Lucy’s class except for the black-haired boy, who Lucy knew went to a different school. He laughed like an excited girl when he saw her standing there. One by one, the boys jumped off the fort and stood around her. There was Tremaine Sheppard, a yellow-skinned Métis boy with a long face and a lumpy nose, the black-haired boy with thick, dark-rimmed glasses whose name she didn’t know, and a French boy called Gilles with long hair that fell in his eyes, who got picked on because of his girl’s name. Normally, they all ignored her.

  “Lucy Wingfeather,” said Tremaine in a mocking tone.

  Even though they were in the same class at school, Lucy was surprised he knew her name. She tried to smile.

  “Lucy Weirdfucker,” said Gilles, and the other boys laughed. Lucy noticed the black-haired boy’s nose was runny and he snuffled a lot trying to keep the snot inside.

  When Tremaine stepped forward to take Lucy by the shoulders, she thought he was going to kiss her right there in front of the other boys and she began to close her eyes in anticipation of her first real kiss. Instead, Tremaine turned Lucy around so that her back was to him and he pulled her close and hugged her to his body. He held her tight to him and bent over at the waist, forcing her to bend too. His elbows dug into her sides while his hands slid up the front of her top to cup her loose breasts both at once. Lucy didn’t try to stop him. The hug felt good and she didn’t even so much mind his hands. The other boys laughed and encouraged him, and Lucy felt like she was a part of something. Tremaine held her like that for a moment before removing his hands from her shirt.

  “Come on,” he said, and took her hand. He jumped onto the hanging bridge that led up to the fort, or “ship,” as it was supposed to be known, and Lucy followed. He lay down in a corner of the fort on the hard wooden boards and pulled Lucy down on top of him. They were partially hidden behind the short walls of the fort. Tremaine rolled over on top of Lucy and put his hand up her shirt again. This time he kissed her too, sending warmth spreading through her belly and tingling inside her chest. Lucy had never felt this before and she thought it might be what it felt like when you fell in love. He took her hand and pulled it down to make her feel his hardness through his jeans. She knew he wanted her to touch it, and so she undid his pants. He exhaled deeply when she reached inside his underwear. Right away, Lucy could see that being with Tremaine was different from Billy. For one thing, she liked that Tremaine kissed her and acted like they were doing something together. With Billy, it always seemed like he was making her do something that was just his idea. Billy never tried to kiss her. She wondered if kissing might be the thing that made people fall in love.