by Nadia Bozak
When Bellyache spoke I looked up and I saw that the moon had come out above him. Over his slumped shoulder my bedroom light was visible. He wore no hat this night, and so there was as much snow on his head as there was soft grey hair. After Pickles told on me, Bellyache had headed out for Long Dash, guessing at the drop-off. Easy pickings now that I was alone and all that was left of Slava O’Right was a hard sting between my legs, still alive and hot and seeping.
“You sleeping with him?”
Sharp, not shouting. Bellyache kept all his anger quiet, and he used words that soiled me and through my clothes made me naked. Like I’d been doing something that was just too ill, too adult, its real name could not be formed in the wet warmth of a mouth even as foul as Bellyache’s.
Got me by the scruff. Lifted me to my feet and again struck me across the face. His glove felt dead and heavy and smelled of sweaty leather. He let me go, crumpled up against the blow, and again I fell down.
“You sleeping with him?”
And the moonlight showed me all the blood there was in the wet snow, sticks and mud and mulch showing through. Red snow, my snow, blood snow. Kid no more. That blood red would warn the world away from me, and so my hurt would keep me safe and therefore alone.
“Get up,” Bellyache said.
When I didn’t, he lifted me instead. Hands on my shoulders, he set in to giving me a rough old shaking. That tired me out, so I fell into his arms, feeling through his droop of coat how he really was like Pickles, a skeleton, though one made of something strong like black-smoked iron rather than of breakable, brittle bone.
To my uncle Bellyache Bozak, guardian of my groin, overgrown, underfed, a sad and soured man, to him the mushy mash of my mouth said back, “Not sleeping with. Fucking.”
Bellyache relaxed at that. He let me go, even eased me to the ground. Somehow it was not worse but better that I’d said it, turned it into truth. From his pocket he pulled a single rolled cigarette and a plastic lighter. Smoking, he paced around, up and down, looked up at the night sky, down at my shrunk-up shoulders. Wanted a haul on that smoke, thought it might work to cool down the hot, wet mask Bellyache had me wearing for a face.
Slow and thoughtful, between drags he said: “Your mom wouldn’t have liked this. Don’t do it no more. For her, don’t do it.”
In all of my life it was the only time he ever said something real about her. Wouldn’t even tell me when he learned she was dead.
He tossed the half-smoked cigarette into the snow and stepped on it. Right close to where I was fallen over and huddled up. “No fucking with O’Rights. For her, no more.”
“For her.” With pointed tongue I poked these words from between my bloody lips. What a weapon my mom was, turning me into a sorrowful shell of a Bozak. Bellyache stepped around so that he was beside and then behind me. Came down on bended knee, as if to offer help or comfort. A cold leather hand on the back of my neck, he forced my face into the ground and he made me eat that red, red snow like a dog has to eat its own shit. After being with Slava O’Right, my blood that night was ripe and ready to flow. There was a lot of it spilled there in the snow, flecked with dirt and bits of bark and little stones and likely mixed in was some animal’s dung pellets. And Bellyache was patient, waiting for me to take each mouthful in and for my throat to swallow it down before he guided my head along to the next patch. Tasted of steel, acid, iron, and it smelled that way too. As I ate, his hands held back my hair, my own being fisted up and therefore useless.
Choked a bit, and Bellyache leaned in closer to me than he’d ever come before. Thought he was going to kiss my cheek or bite it or both, but instead of that he whispered, “Slava O’Right . . .” and through clamped jaw and clenched teeth, he said a word that knotted me and Slava tight together. And it was nothing to do with love and everything to do with blood and it made my shoulders shrink, my ears shrivel, and my heart inside me, it got very old. The taste of blood in my mouth, it changed and it tasted like something else, something sick and something other than Bozak. Slava O’Right betraying me and humiliating me for all the goddamn town to see—it came upon me like a case of whiplash and Bellyache’s whisper. Knew I would it hear again and again, circulating in my Bozak brain like blood pumps through veins.
Then Bellyache let go and got back to his feet, and I saw in the light of the moon that the ground all around me was back to being mostly clean and white. My dirt washed away, blood bleached out. All my dreams, they were suddenly coloured dirty.
When he got up, I did too. Followed Bellyache back through the bush to the trailer where we lived. He went in first, shutting the door in my face and locking it behind him, leaving me to climb back in through my bedroom window as if none of that night had happened.
In the dark of my room I sat and smoked for a couple of goddamn hours, waiting until I heard Bellyache snoring above the sound of the TV, and then I crept into the kitchen and took all the food I could get my hands on. Oatmeal, jars of peanut butter and jam, bread, instant coffee, tea, sugar. A shitload of jerky. Some bags of biscuits. Broth in cubes, packets of Tang. Two bottles of his whisky and also his goddamn tobacco stash from the freezer. Flashlight from under the sink, batteries too. For a weapon I grabbed a dirty steak knife out of the sink. The shitty aeronautical chart tacked on to the wall would be my map. In the broom closet were tarps and sleeping bag, a sack filled with Bellyache’s old bush supplies, cooking pots, waterproof matches, bear spray, Muskol. Had a bit of money stashed in my room. Went fast, before Slava packed up and fucked off back down the road and also before all Bellyache had said sunk in and made it so I could not move for the pain and shame and ache of it.
He’d warned me away from Slava O’Right pretty goddamn clear, and he thought surely, after that, I’d obey him. In my heart, and into the future, I took what he taught me, carrying around a piece of hate and it had the taste of red snow. Hate for Bellyache and for the mom Bellyache talked about—I hated her and I tasted her. And for being from goddamn Black Dew Seat and being a girl and being a Bozak too. And Pickles, I should have hated Pickles too, just for ratting me out like that, but I couldn’t. But really none of that mattered. Those hates were so much less than the one I had now for Slava and all the goddamn O’Rights. The hate that Bellyache had whispered into my goddamn ear, the sound of it watered my eyes with ripe vinegar and turned my heart into a fist. So I got all my shit about me, and stuffed it inside a big old camping pack. Spat on my pillow and in my bed, and I crawled through my window and ran back into the woods and into the night.
Snow had stopped. All the world but me slept on under the hush of it. Down the Long Dash Road, then east away from Black Dew Seat and toward the O’Right homestead, I ran as hard as was possible beneath the weight of my pack, the pain in my face, the huge, choking stone that was rising and falling in my chest. The sound of the spurs on my boots was company and courage and made sure I kept going. Had to get to Slava and stab out his goddamn heart before he hoofed it back to Ottawa. It was a long way to go on foot, some seven kilometres, maybe eight. Stopped when I thought I might give out and have a goddamn cry, but instead I rubbed snow on my beat-up face and lit a smoke, and from the flask in the pocket of my leather jacket, I drank deep. Night was just beginning to crack and break when I came up to Dagger Moon Junction. Crossed over, intending to cut west through the bush and sneak up on the O’Right place. Didn’t have a plan beyond that. Just would let all my hurt and rage and the dirty steak knife be my guides—they’d tell me what to do when I saw him. Then in the dirty grey of what was left of night, I saw up ahead something lying in the road, and getting closer I saw blood in the snow where something had been dragged. Some two, three hours before me and Slava had hit that goddamn deer and just left it to die and here I was again, somehow destined to find it. But it wasn’t a deer at all. Knew that when I saw it was a human boot. And I went up to it and I stared at it, fallen on its side in the pre-dawn light, and from then on ev
erything went from fucked up to bad luck to rotten and awful and worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
The ripening drama of eastern Ontario.
Gatineau Valley, seen here in spring.
ALL IS WELL, SWELL, LESS THAN HELL on Highway 416 southbound. The truck follows it along, holding tight to the outside lane, careful not to draw attention to itself. Beyond the usual rust and decay, its body is still smashed up from an attack waged against it, up north where the baby’s dad has as many enemies as the land has trees, lakes, hungry bears. Like eyes, the headlights were punched out and blackened, though instead of just bruised, they were shattered, left blind. The bulbs have since been replaced, but their Plexiglas casings are gone for good. They stare, glare, balls of light, peeled back and vicious. The grill too is dinged and dented, bent and splattered around with burnt blood that passes for thick rust.
They go on. Driving, smoking, chewing nails that push through scar-thickened fingertips. Kid’s on the lap, wrapped up in a jacket. Looking in the rearview mirror, the face the stranger sees is unfamiliar, spotted with blood the kid’s dad was spitting and also there’s short, dark hair where just days before there had been years of thick, whitish growth. The kid keeps quiet. Too hungry and thirsty to make a fuss. Is still, limp, almost weightless, could be taken for a newborn were it not for the amount of hair and teeth it’s got.
Maybe it’ll die, the stranger thinks.
Then the ham sandwich bought back at the bus station the night before is remembered, pulled from the pocket, and, one hand on the wheel, poked into the kid’s little mouth. The kid chews, but does not swallow, and the food is spit out in wet chunks.
On the passenger seat there’s a road map. On it a lone star, scrawled in bleeding blue pen, marks a spot not far off 416. Due south for a piece, then maybe thirty or forty kilometres more to the east. The stranger knows the kid’s dad’s business well enough to figure out that the star is an Indian reserve. So that’s where they’ll go flip the cases of contraband loaded up in the back before going across the border.
The kid’s gone to sleep, dark head lolling about.
Lights a cigarette, shivers. On the dash is a postcard in a small brown envelope. With a free hand the stranger takes it out and looks at its glossy landscape. Keeping a promise to stay in touch with what lies ahead, at the next stop it will be stamped and mailed out to Los Angeles, California. A more specific address has not been provided, but the stranger is sure it will reach the right person.
The stranger sighs, wondering what that postcard will have the guts to say. Outside the morning is bright. There’s a shiny lake on the right and also there’s fresh-faced forest. And they go on, quiet and together, down Highway 416.
CHAPTER SIX
Woke up wet and in dirt and in a world that smelled so ripe, like rain. And it reeked of home that way, that soaking cold soil, worse than any kind of old piss or nicotine fingers. Iron on tongue, the taste of hate on the brain, in the buds. Like this, then, I opened my eyes and saw that I was still deep inside the northern bush, so cold and wet and always with that stink like fresh bloody birth. So here was me, just Bozak, like I thought I’d always wanted, though for so long I’d imagined being alone would also mean being with Slava O’Right. But alone I was. That was how it worked out, me running off into the bush like some kind of mad trapper.
Now and here instead of Bellyache and high school and all that small-town bullshit, I had a face full of melted snow and boots filled with mud. Now and here I was getting gone and going on, stopping only for smokes, a quick drink, to build a fire and try to remember the feeling of warmth. Sleeping only when my body gave in, laid out stiff as a corpse under the bushes, under the moon froze to blue, under the star-soaking sky of northern Ontario. Four nights, five mornings and days of the same, and I came to be as damp and mouldy as if I’d just come back from my own black grave. Had gone far by my own two boots, but still I thought maybe it would never be far enough to say I was really away from home.
There was no choice but for me to leave, and so I went, fixing on bush giving way to highway sooner or later if only I walked on far enough. It was south where I was going. Just like I always said I would, only now the arrangements were a bit more desperate. Thought it would be easy enough to make it so the North meant nothing to me anymore because bastards like me are lucky like that, with no moms to impress, no fathers to follow, rights or wrongs to inherit. But all that freedom I made up for with my very own heavy heart, stuffed to full with the cold cast iron of black regret. So you carry it around and somehow you carry on. And even after you’ve buried it, you find the shadow of bad memory always weighs more than the real live thing ever did.
Nineteen eighty-nine and me, Bozak, I left Black Dew Seat before the snow was gone and the body I had buried in the bush had a chance to come up ripe and rotten in the thaw of northern spring. Night was turning into morning, going grey right down to the very roots. Was hungry. My mind, it was cold. Body beaten down to the old and musty bone. Sit up. Stretch. Shed sleeping bag and set about getting myself together. Packed gear up tight, laced boots even tighter. Fingers combed my dirty wig of hair—knife-cut to the shoulder, heavy bangs, bleached-out white and the ends blackened with spray paint. Wished it was time to smoke and wished more it was time for a drink, but I had to keep those things rationed until I braved my way back onto a road where there might be a store or a station. So instead of smoking, I swallowed deep. Chewed the air. Chewed my tongue. Then I shouldered my gear and set off, straight toward the lake that I saw through the lightening forest, a strip of cold blue horizon. Thought I’d wash up down there, fill my pot with water, make a fire on the shore, and boil up some breakfast. Watch the sun rise, choke down porridge with no milk, burned and bitter coffee. Then I’d finally have myself that smoke. On the lakeshore I’d get a feel for the land, compare what I saw to what was there on the map folded up in my pocket.
Damp and dirty mitts pried through the thick stick of bush. The boots I had were brutal big ones, and if they weren’t so dirty, they’d have been a nice, bright black. Laced up to the shin, they fell heavy with each foot forward, crunching into the frosted earth, breaking through to the spring mulch beneath. But the best part of those boots were the spurs. Real cowboy spurs, silver-gold, hooked under the heel and making no sense up there in the bush without a horse to kick around. As I walked, the spurs quietly jiggled, and they kept me company, my own footsteps did, making me less lonely. Wiped the rust from the corners of my eyes and the cloudy snot dangling from my nose. My mitts smelt of smoke—tobacco and campfire—and also of muddy earth. The jeans I wore, leather jacket, tangled hair, had about them their own scent—damp wood and fresh air mixed in with Muskol. That’s a smell you can never stop remembering, the smell of the outside when the cold makes you sweat. Like cowboys always had the smell of their horses in the desert, I had the smell of my mitts in the outside.
Someplace between here and the lake I stopped to hang a leak, pulling down my jeans and steaming a hot hole into the ground. My ass, this piss, these were the only warm things from here to what seemed someplace you’d call forever. All those mornings and nights that were turning into days—hell is not hot, hell is that northern thaw, so damp it makes wet even the deadest bone.
Broke through the forest and looked along the stretch of lake and granite rock and forest that was now laid out before me. All along the horizon these black bruised-up clouds of rain were coming. Light was a dull, dirty wash and the cold of the lake there, the sight and sound and stretch of it, froze the water on my eyes. But then I saw something. Beached on the shore maybe twenty metres away was a red canoe, all chipped up and bashed in, the survivor of some wreckage. That boat, it startled me to see it, coming from out of nowhere. A ghost. A sign that out there was a life besides my own.
Beside the boat there was an Indian. Just there on the shore, real cool and poised, still enough I guess I’d looked right through him, taken him
for a rock. Of course it had to be an Indian, right, not any other kind of kid but a goddamn Indian one. Getting real nervous and so I ducked down and stepped back into the bush. Hid myself pretty well, and if he heard me behind him he gave no reaction. Really, he stayed still as a statue made of human stone, squatting on his heels and looking out at the lapping water.
Slid my pack from my shoulders and sat down on it. Thought he’d rise up or sway or turn around, but instead he just kept real still. So I watched him for a while, and as I did I ran my finger back and forth along the length of the hunting knife hanging from my belt. It was Pickles’ knife. Six-inch, bone-handled, sheathed in brown leather with thick rawhide stitching that still bore the teeth marks of the hunter who’d fashioned it. Began wishing that boy would set his canoe to water and paddle away until there was nothing but a smudge on the horizon. And that would be it. Fuck ya later, Indian. Forget about him being a big bad omen, a gasp of past, the buried body come to thaw, to haunt me through the hide of my dirty-hearted conscience.
He took his sweet old time sizing up the dark sky, scoping it out, weighing the chances of the storm drifting past. His canoe lay belly-up on the shore, cast off to the right of him as if they had fought and now were ignoring each other. That bloody canoe, its belly a map of homespun, eyeballed patchwork—all staples and duct tape bandages, a boat that could only have been christened in a puddle of that kid’s own spit. The thing looked half-starved, a maniac from overwork, and from where I sat I could count its stiff ribs, so shrunken was it. On the bow was painted with yellow spray the number 37. This one was once a racing canoe, now used-up and downright ravaged. Definitely these two were desperados like I was. Maybe worse. Pulled out my tobacco and rolled a slender cigarette. Did this hoping it would shut up the appetite gnawing at the thin skin of my insides.