Monkey Beach (19 page)

“Mom doesn’t see anything,” I protested.

Ma-ma-oo grunted again. “She doesn’t tell you when she sees things. Or she’s forgotten how. Or she ignores it. You’ll have to ask her. Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more. And I was too young back then to put them in here.” She tapped her temple.

I was only half-listening to her. As soon as she said you could communicate with your dead, I wondered if I could talk with Mick. “How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s like oxasuli. Tricky stuff.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed.

We hung the cedar in her house first and put oxasuli on the windowsills. When we put the cedar up in my room, Dad came in and raised an eyebrow when he saw what we were doing, but he didn’t say anything.

The raven flying near the shore catches my eye. It croaks, then disappears into the trees. I loved Ma-ma-oo’s stories about the cheeky, shape-changing raven named Weegit. I try to remember a story she told me, but I am distracted. My hands are chapped and tingling from holding the throttle. I wish I’d thought to
bring gloves. I hadn’t thought it would be so cold in the middle of August. I think it was grade seven when I learned that wind starts as a difference in temperature between the air and the ground. Whatever the reason, the waves hitting the bow send constant shudders through the speedboat. Worse, the spray sent up by the bow keeps putting out my cigarette.

School started four weeks after Mick’s funeral. Mom and Dad came into my bedroom and asked me if I was feeling up to going. I was tired of them hovering over me so I said it was fine.

God, I thought as he walked into my math class, don’t do this. Please don’t do this. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Tab had moved to Vancouver, Frank had been kicked out of his school in the first week and transferred to mine. He’d been kicked out of most of the elementary schools in Kitimat because he kept beating up other kids. He sat in the seat directly behind me, grinning. As the teacher did roll call, Frank began throwing spitballs into my hair. She called out his name, and he said, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

In her first and last letter to me, Tab commiserated with my bad luck. Meanwhile, across the playground from us, Frank was taking charge of his cousins, Pooch and Cheese, two of the meanest boys in school. They raced each other to the top of the hill near the swings, then pushed each other down.

Frank always sat behind me in class and as the weeks
wore on, he began pinching and jabbing my arms. He’d reach forward and poke hard enough to bruise. He began to kick my chair. Telling the teacher would make him and his thugs gang up on me at recess—I’d seen him do it to other kids. Complaining about him would be an unending hell of getting picked on in the village and at school. As far as I was concerned, someone else could have that privilege.

Some days, it was hard to do anything. Even eating seemed like too much trouble. I’d lie in bed and stare at nothing, and hours would pass in a flash. Then the next thing I knew, Mom would be calling me for dinner. It wasn’t even painful. I felt nothing. Blank.

Other days I wanted to run. Really run, push myself until I fell down. I ran up and down the highway, up the power lines, around and around the village. When taking a breath hurt, when sweat soaked me right down to the tips of my hair, when my muscles spasmed and ticked, I stopped. After the first snowfall, Mom made me stop running because she said the last thing I needed was a broken leg.

After supper one evening, I was listlessly doing homework at the kitchen table. Dad had walked over to Uncle Geordie’s house to watch a hockey game. Which meant that he and Uncle Geordie were going to get tipsy and annoy Aunt Edith by smoking inside, drinking beer without using her coasters, spilling chips on the carpet and shouting wildly whenever their favoured team scored. Mom was out visiting. Jimmy went into Dad’s pockets and filched his car keys. “You wanna go for a ride?” He spun the key ring. “It’ll be fun.”

I felt my eyes stretch wide in disbelief. “Are you feeling all right?”

“No guts,” he said. “No glory.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“We’ll be back before anyone even knows we’re gone.”

“What’s got into you?”

Jimmy shrugged. I’d never seen him like this before, and wondered if he would actually go through with it.

We grabbed some things we thought we’d need, then strolled out to the car. He put on a baseball cap and clicked in his seat belt. I tucked my hair under one of Mom’s old wigs and put on a pair of her huge sunglasses, which kept sliding down my nose.

“One of these pedals is the brake and one is the gas,” he said, scowling in concentration. He fumbled with the keys for a while. The engine kicked in. I peeked out the window. No one was watching us. As he sat in the driver’s seat adjusting the pillows we’d stolen from the living room, it occurred to me that we knew squat about driving.

“It would make sense that the pedal nearest my right foot is the gas, because you have to step on it more. I think Dad used this one—” He moved the top stick to R and pressed down hard on the pedal. The car shot out of the driveway, right across the street and up our neighbour’s driveway. We were almost to their door before he stomped on the brakes, jerking so hard that I bumped my head on the dashboard.

“Maybe now,” he said, “would be a good time to put on your seat belt.”

He drove to town, slowly and cautiously at first, and then with more speed. I liked the sudden freedom, being away from everyone and everything, able to go wherever we pleased. Jimmy’s face was flushed, his eyes sparkled and he couldn’t stop smiling. “You want to try?”

I grinned. “You betcha.”

The wig was hot and itchy, but I didn’t want to take the chance of someone seeing me without it. Jimmy tensed and lowered his head whenever a car heading towards the village passed us, but I casually lifted my hand and waved and got a jolt of pleasure when people waved back, not at all suspicious.

Jimmy turned on the radio and cranked it. “Funky Town” was playing, and we started singing along. He tilted his seat back and laughed, then said, “I always wanted to tell you something.”

“What?” I said. We were nearly to Hirsh Creek when I saw the police car in the rearview mirror. I lost track of the road for a minute and almost steered us into a ditch.

“What’s wrong?” Jimmy said, his voice rising. “What’s happening?”

“It’s okay, it’s cool. Don’t panic—”

“Panic?” Jimmy spotted the police car in the side mirror. “Holy fuck,” he said breathlessly. “Holy fuck. It’s the cops.”

The lights flashed in my rearview mirror. My throat went dry. I pulled over and rolled my window down. I looked up innocently at the officer, who frowned down at me in my overlarge wig.

“Evening,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’d ask you for your driver’s licence,” he said, “but I’d be wasting my time, wouldn’t I?”

I felt my face flushing deep red. “Would you believe I’m pregnant?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, my brother’s got a bad stomach ache. He really has to go to the hospital—”

Jimmy punched me hard in the arm.

“Let’s call your parents,” the officer said.

There is nothing like a police escort to attract attention. The police officer lectured me and Jimmy all the way home, while his partner followed us in my dad’s car. When we got home, Dad started shouting and didn’t stop until Mom started and they drowned each other out. I sat meekly in my chair and went to bed, grounded until kingdom come, which turned out to be four weeks later. They didn’t yell at Jimmy—and if he wasn’t going to tell them it was his idea, I wasn’t going to bother to explain something they’d never believe anyway.

The weather was still good so Ma-ma-oo grabbed her berry pails, took me out to the Terrace highway and we drove up a logging road. She’d inherited Mick’s truck, and sometimes I’d look over and expect to see him.

“Look,” she said, coming up to a bush. “See these ones?
Pipxs’m.”

“That’s what you call blueberries in Haisla?”

“No, no, just these blueberries. See, they have white stuff on them.
Pipxs’m
means ‘berries with mould on them.’ ”

“Mmm, tasty.”

“They are.” As if to prove it, she popped a few in her mouth and chewed with her eyes closed. I tried one, and it was so sweet it was almost piercing. I had never noticed that there were different types of blueberry bushes. If it was blue and on a bush, you picked it. Ma-ma-oo pointed out the contrast in the leaves and stems, but it was easier to see the distinctions in the berries themselves. We found the other kind,
sya’k°nalh
, “the real blueberry,” shiny bluish-black berries, prettier, but not as sweet as
pipxs’m
. We drove around, going higher up the mountains until we found the third type, pear-shaped and plump and sweet. Their Haisla name is
mimayus
, which, loosely translated, means “pain in the ass,” because although they taste wonderful, they’re hard to find and to pick.

“We used to call my sister Mimayus,” she said, smiling fondly at the berries in her hand.

“You have a sister?” I said.

“Oh, yes. She died long ago.”

“Was she older or younger?”

“Older.”

“And she was a pain in the ass?”

“Her real name was Eunice.”

“How’d she die? Is it okay to ask?”

“Yes. Do you ever run out of questions?”

“No. But I can shut up if you want.”

She chuckled. “I think that would kill you.”

We spent the last of the good weather tromping through bushes, picking berries and watching “Dynasty,” with Ma-ma-oo shouting advice to the wayward Alexis.

Namu
, Ma-ma-oo explained later, means whirlwind. The area is famous for whirlwinds. Usually, they’re only the small ones; they play on the water, go in the bay and dance out. She found this out after Mimayus fell in love with a Bella Bella boy. To be closer to her handsome Heiltsuk, Mimayus went to work in the cannery in Namu where her Bella Bella boy had a job as a fisherman.

But one Halloween, Mimayus hitched a ride with a man who was on his way to Bella Bella in his gillnetter. Her Bella Bella boy’s birthday was the next day, and his family was throwing him a huge party. Mimayus wanted to surprise him, so she had told him she couldn’t make it. The weather had been iffy all week, sometimes hot and summery, sometimes blistering cold. But that day it had been especially bad. Towards evening, when the sky cleared, the man said they should make a run for it now or they wouldn’t make it at all.

A troller also going to Bella Bella had agreed to follow behind the gillnetter so they could help each other out if anything went wrong. The skipper of the troller was bringing his pregnant wife to the hospital. Both the boats were old.