Monkey Beach (9 page)

“My Frankie needs shots because of your daughter,” she said.

“Oh?” Mom said.

“Look at what she did.” She pulled Frank to her, spun him around and pushed his shorts down.

“Mom!” Frank said, pulling his shorts back up.

“If Frankie hadn’t been torturing my daughter, he wouldn’t have got bit, would he? I’d say he got what he deserved.”

“I could sue you.”

“Try it. I’ll see your juvenile delinquent in foster care faster than you can say court date.”

“Ladies, ladies, ladies,” an orderly said, jogging into the waiting room to stand between them. The nurse hastily called out Frank’s name and ushered them out.

“Wipe that smirk off your face,” Mom said to Uncle Mick, who immediately sucked his smile into a pucker.

She paced the waiting room while he cheerfully gave the duty nurse our address and phone number. I sat by the TV, wiggling a loose tooth with my tongue.

While Mom was in the bathroom and Mick was flirting with the nurse, Frank and his mother came back out. She came right up to me and said, “I think you have something to say to my son.”

I knew I was supposed to say sorry. But if Frank wasn’t going to say it, neither was I. “You taste like poo.”

“You are a monster,” she said to me. “You are an evil little monster.”

“Takes one to know one!” Mick shouted, looking up from his potential date.

She scowled at him. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” She hustled Frank out of there.

Mick came up and knelt beside me. “You okay?”

“I’m not a monster,” I said.

He grinned at me. “You’re nowhere near as bad as your mom was. Now, she was a holy terror.”

“Nobody likes me,” I said.

“Kiddo,” Mick said, kissing my forehead, “you are my favourite monster in the whole wide world.”

Three days later, I answered the front door and Mick’s friend Josh stared down at me. He said, in a loud, tipsy stage whisper, that he had taken care of his nephew Frankie for me. “You want me to bring him over to say sorry, I can do that, too.”

I shook my head.

Josh leaned over. I turned my face away and held my breath because it smelled like something had died in his mouth.

“He’s spoiled, that’s what he is. He just needed a good kick in the pants. He’ll learn, God love him.”

Later that evening, Mom and Dad offered to fix up the basement for Mick, but he decided he was going to live with Josh until he got back on his feet.

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Your mother said he isn’t right and I think she’s on to something.”

“He’s okay.” Mick said.

“He is kind of haywire,” Dad said.

“He’s a bit fucked up, but, hey, who isn’t?”

“But—”

“It’s my own mess, Albert Hill. You don’t have to clean up after me any more. I’m a big boy.” When Dad still looked doubtful, Mick noogied his head. “Stop worrying, will you?”

Mick took me Christmas-tree hunting that winter. We drove along the highway between Terrace and Kitimat and stopped when Mick thought we’d reached a good spot. As we drove, Mick played Elvis and homemade tapes that his friends had sent him, with songs like “FBI Lies,” “Fuck the Oppressors” and, my favourite, “I Shot Custer.” Despite my pleading that they really were socially conscious, Abba was absolutely forbidden in Mick’s cassette deck.

“She’s got to know about these things,” Mick would say to Dad, who was disturbed by a note from one of my teachers. She had forced us to read a book that said that the Indians on the northwest coast of British Columbia had killed and eaten people as religious sacrifices. My teacher had made us each read a paragraph out loud. When my turn came, I sat there shaking, absolutely furious.

“Lisa?” she’d said. “Did you hear me? Please read the next paragraph.”

“But it’s all lies,” I’d said.

The teacher stared at me as if I were mutating into a hideous thing from outer space. The class, sensing tension, began to titter and whisper. She slowly turned red, and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Ma-ma-oo told me it was just pretend, the eating people, like drinking Christ’s blood at Communion.”

In a clipped, tight voice, she told me to sit down.

Since I was going to get into trouble anyway, I started singing “Fuck the Oppressors.” The class cheered, more because of the swearing than anything else, and I was promptly dragged, still singing, to the principal’s office.

Mick went out and had the teacher’s note laminated and framed. He hammered a nail into his wall and hung the note in the centre of the living room. He put his arm around me, swallowed hard a few times and looked misty. “My little warrior.”

Dad was not impressed with Mick’s influence on me. He gave his older brother a hard slap to the side of his head. Mick got him in a headlock, then wrestled him to the ground. Once he got Dad pinned, he held him there until Dad called him the most handsome, bravest and smartest warrior in the world. He let Mick get away with “brainwashing” me because my uncle was one of the only people willing to be my baby-sitter.

Our Christmas-tree hunt was something Dad didn’t mind. Their father used to take them on the same yearly trek. “I had to go even when I told him I hated it,” he said to me as we put the dishes away.
“Dumb idea anyway. Who sat around and decided a dead tree in the house would make the winter that much more festive?” And Mom agreed, then grumbled about the dried needles in her carpet and said that she was the only one who watered the stupid thing. Mick invited Jimmy, who looked up from his homework with a puzzled expression.

“Outside? In the cold?”

“It’ll be fun,” Mick said.

“Why don’t we just buy a tree from Overwaitea?” Jimmy said.

“Come on,” Mick said, lifting him out of his chair, “stop being an old man.”

“Oh, leave him alone,” Dad said. “If he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to.”

I loved the long slog through the bush in snowshoes, walking as awkwardly as an astronaut in zero g. I loved the wind’s sting on my face. I loved the steady hiss of our breath, the crunch of our snowshoes and the tinkle of snow blown from the trees. Mick loved the exercise; Mom loved it that I was so tired when I got back that I collapsed into bed; Dad loved the free tree.

Mick and I would examine the trees carefully, discussing the balance of the branches, the plump or dry feel of the needles, the thickness of the trunk. I preferred spruce, for its harmonious triangular slope; Uncle Mick leaned towards pine, for the squirt of scent it gave off when you crushed the needles between your fingers, the aroma that filled a room like the heavy smell of oranges. Inevitably, Mick picked for himself only the scrawny, half-dead trees we came across. Mom called them his Charlie Brown trees and
said God only knew why he liked them. I figured Mick always went for the underdogs. Which was fine for Mick, because no one saw his tree but him. Mom would kill me if I brought home a tree that butt-ugly.

We ended the day of the first Christmas-tree hunt with hot chocolate and sugar cookies for me, and a beer and a slice of mincemeat pie for Mick. Jimmy, Mom and Dad argued over where the decorations would go, while Mick sat at the kitchen table and ignored them. We had done our work. After I finished my cookies, I fell asleep at the table. Later, as I got older, we’d end the hunt by sitting in a comfortable, satisfied silence until Mick decided it was time to go. He would lean over me, kiss the top of my head, then leave without saying goodbye.

A week before Christmas, while my parents were doing last-minute shopping, Dad dropped us off at Mick’s new apartment. Some people were roaring so hard, we could hear them all the way from the lobby. His visitor was a man with two long braids, high pockmarked cheekbones and a crooked nose. He seemed familiar, even though I’d never met him before, and then I realized he smelled like Mick. He was surrounded by the strong odour of cigarettes, the same brand that Mick smoked.

“Al!” Mick said. “Come meet Barry. Barry, this is my brother, Al. That’s Jimmy, the future Olympic star, and this,” he grabbed me and noogied my head, “is our little warrior, Monster.”

“Heya,” Barry said in a deep, raspy voice. He shook Dad’s hand.

“I didn’t know you had a guest,” Dad said.

“Guest?” Barry said. “You didn’t tell them about me? And me, your family, you ungrateful bastard!”

Mick grinned. “We were in Washington together, at the BIA building—”

“Are you still trying to sell that load of crap about being a warrior?” Barry said, elbowing Mick in the ribs. “Ah, tell the truth. You just joined A.I.M. to get in my sister’s pants.”

Dad frowned. “I can ask Edith to look after the kids if you want to visit—”

“No, no, stay,” Mick said.

“I—”

“Al, this is your brother-in-law,” Mick said, sitting back, waiting for Dad’s reaction.

“Yeah?” Dad said, looking skeptical. “Was the invitation in the mail?”

“Nah, it was an Indian marriage,” Barry said. “Medicine man and everything. How long’d you stay together, Fly-by? Two, three days?”

“Screw you,” Mick said, shoving Barry, who shoved him back.

“Hey, you’re not my type,” he said.

“Kids are present,” Dad said.

“I got to get going,” Barry said, standing. He towered over Dad, but slouched so he was Mick’s height. “Think about it, Mick.”

He shook his head. “I’m retired. Good to see you, though. Stay out of trouble, you crazy bastard.”

Barry slapped his shoulder. “Take your own advice.”

They laughed again and his friend nodded to us, then left.

“What was that about?” Dad said.

“Barry? He’s getting together support for another hopeless cause. Some caribou thing up north.”

Dad asked if we could stay until ten or so, and Mick said that was no problem. Jimmy settled down in front of the TV and I waited until Dad was gone before I asked Mick if he was really married.

“Another life,” he said. “Long, long ago. Who wants ice cream?”

Mick took me
q°alh’m
picking in the spring. We wandered through the bushes, stopping to examine interesting trees or listen to birds or throw rocks in rivers. We scanned the ground for the serrated, broad leaves of thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots,
q°alh’m
. You had to be careful not to pick the ones higher than your knees, because once they were that tall the stalks became woody and no amount of chewing would make them soft.

Winter in Kitamaat meant a whole season of flaccid, expensive vegetables from town.
Q°alh’m
was the first taste of spring. The skin of the shoots had a texture similar to kiwi skin, prickly soft. Once you peeled them, the shoots were translucent green, had a light crunch and a taste close to fresh snow peas.
Q°alh’m
picking lasts a few weeks at best.

Mick had two large bundles of
q°alh’m
under his arms. I had a smaller one that I had reduced to two shoots by the time Mick was ready to go back to his truck.

“Let’s drop this one off at Mother’s,” Mick said, holding up a bundle.

Ma-ma-oo’s house was one of the oldest in the village, a box with a low-ceiling basement and a steeple-like roof. It was painted a plain, flat brown, which was peeling back to reveal grey wood. The glass in the windows was so warped that the world outside looked like it was being reflected through a fun-house mirror. She never liked gardening, so the lawn was wild, with tree-high elderberry bushes and a tangle of untrimmed grass.

Mick opened the door and stepped inside, then said, “Yowtz!”

“Mick!” Ma-ma-oo said. She was brushing her hands against her apron as she came out of the kitchen.

“Here,” Mick said, handing her the bundles of
q°alh’m
.

“Oh, I was wanting her,” she said. “Come in, sit, have tea.”

We followed her into the kitchen where freshly baked biscuits were cooling on the countertops. Once I was eating and quiet she turned to Mick and they talked while I watched everything around me. Inside, she kept the house tidy, but she didn’t bother to decorate like other grandmas I knew. There was nothing on the walls, no doilies on the chairs, no knickknacks on her coffee table. Her saggy, orange sofa never moved from its spot by the front window. I was afraid to touch the curtains because they were so threadbare. If you breathed hard, they whispered against her cracking linoleum, which still had a few sparkles not worn out of its yellowing surface. She had a heavy, black rotary phone that rang like a fire alarm. On the phone stand,
she kept a picture of her husband, Sherman, who had died before I was born; another picture of Uncle Mick holding a giant halibut; and a popsicle-stick house I’d made for her in kindergarten and painted hearts all over. Even when the glue wore out and the popsicle sticks fell off one by one, she didn’t throw it out.

Ma-ma-oo wore Salvation Army thrift-shop clothes. Shirts and dresses she turned into aprons when they got too thin. When the aprons wore out, she made them into wash rags, and when the rags disintegrated, she used them for stuffing in her pillows. This habit of wearing things until they fell off her body annoyed Mom to no end. She would regularly buy Ma-ma-oo stylishly cut dresses, slacks and shirts. Ma-ma-oo would carefully put them in her storeroom and say she’d wear them when she was trying to impress someone.