The Man Game (61 page)

The night came fast. He slept in fitful purges. In another life he did not dodge the things he feared.

When he awoke she was still beside him in bed. She smiled and stretched her fine arms. Her arms reminded him at that moment of the shape and colours of the arbutus tree, chocolate-blond with a fiery streak; and the arbutus, the dancer of the trees, reminded him of her preoccupations, her history, the man game, the theatre. Oh, I had the best sleep ever, she said.

FOURTEEN

… a trade language of some kind probably existed prior to European contact, which began “morphing” into the more familiar Chinook Jargon in the late 1790s, notably at a dinner party at Nootka Sound where Capts Vancouver and Bodega y Quadra were entertained by Chief Maquinna and his brother Callicum performing a theatrical using mock-English and mock-Spanish words and mimickry[sic]of European dress and mannerisms.

–
WIKIPEDIA

At the bottom of high tide, sole, flounder, cod, and crabs drove in to eat from southern shores of the inlet, below Sammy's office. Sometimes when the tide sucked back out there remained fish trapped in rock ponds. The smell around Vancouver was sometimes poisonous from the schools of dying fish. If the wind blew south off the water, nausea crashed over the whole township.

The office doorhandle wobbled around and a Hastings Mill messageboy slid in and noiselessly delivered a telegram folded in half. Toronto opened the paper, dented with type, and showed it to Sammy, who read:
YOUR MOTHER DIED STOP FUNERAL SUNDAY STOP
…

Sunday stop. Your Mother. He stared at the telegram for some time. In the weeks since his brother had left town, he'd been thinking about him. Dunbar. Again The Whore Without A Face. His brother and mother were dead. And the two telegrams were the most he'd heard from his father since his decision to move to Vancouver. There were more words in the telegram but they didn't appear on the paper,
they just appeared, as if transcribed from the cold heart of reckoning.

His wife was a destroyer. He blamed her. Slowly but surely she was bringing his whole family crumbling in on him.

His heart, a little bruised, compelled him to speak, and Toronto listened to him talk about his mother: During my boyhood I saw Mother as no different from a toy. She was a top that I let spin around the kitchen, preparing meals—a
joy
, she said—bouncing her off the walls a the living room with a duster in her hand while I followed, laughing at the brink a tears, spinning her further and further away from herself until my brother caught her, scolded me, and sequestered her in the library where she quietly, assiduously helped him study agriculture. Pardon me my reveries, Toronto. How are you? Sammy asked.

Better, said Toronto. Much better, thanks, sir.

Sammy had a peregrine falcon inside the bookshelf, on the topmost shelf, perched on a block of wood in its aerie between leatherbound journals of advanced teleological accounting, staring perpetually over its wing down at the two men seated in the office. There was the slope-shouldered redskin dripping India ink on a rulered page. And there was the immobilized one who looked back at the falcon with complicated envy.

I trust you with my innermost thoughts, said Sammy. I trust you with my deepest fears. My cruellest imaginings. My worst prejudices. I trust you without judgment or protest. And I trust you to keep it all a secret, as if from your own mind. And you have done so without fail.

Toronto nodded.

And I need that more than ever now. I have no defences against you or the world, Sammy said. I haven't a single means a defence. I could die by your hands this very moment. Every word, I trust you not to strangle me with. These words are all I have. I don't know how else to explain it. I barely enjoy life. I tell
you
. These journals feel like my only freedom from the prison a my blasted head. May I ask you a question?

Toronto nodded.

Are you telling me the truth? Are you feeling better?

Toronto tried but failed to convincingly nod.

I know you don't want to, said Sammy. We must. We must see your father, your mother, your chief.

Yessir, said Toronto, but Indians might kill me.

You might still die if we don't.

He didn't tell his ward about the death of his own mother, to keep Toronto's feelings uncomplicated. Still the Indian wept. He said: No one ever help me before.

Let's find Molly and take you to see your peoples.

Little August Jack Khatsahlahno, not ten years old, stood under the Burrard Bridge and watched the waters of False Creek break along the pebbles and bleached shells with a sound not unlike footsteps. Jack did not know to whom the ocean walked, or for how many eons the ocean's search had continued, but nevertheless the child was reckoned a genius by the members of the Snauq Indian reserve who had lived under this bridge since before there was a bridge, a Vancouver, a Whitemans. The Snauq had been living in this area so long, in fact, that their oldest ancestors had turned into stones, and so had their dogs. So no one thought he was being foolish, standing on the beach dreaming up ways to get attention, when this child skidded to a stop by the firepit in the middle of the longhouse to say there was a ghost on False Creek. And indeed, when Chief Chip-kaay-am and the others made their way down to the beach there was, as Jack had said, a ghost travelling towards them across the water. He paddled a cedar canoe, accompanied by two Whitemans, a man and a lady, as well as some cargo, namely a large wheeled chair.

When the canoe rubbed ashore, Chip-kaay-am held up his palm, made it clear he'd talk only to Sammy, and refused to allow any of them to disembark. He warned Sammy that if Toronto stepped foot on Snauq ground they'd instantly kill him. There were weapons among them. No one in the canoe was surprised to hear it. Toronto lowered his eyes. The three
of them sat in the canoe, one behind the other with Toronto at the back and Sammy at the front and Molly in the middle, moving only their heads in the cradle of the waves, as Sammy reasoned with the Chief. English was not easy, so they talked partly in Chinook, and had to make do even as Chip-kaay-am grew more and more impatient at being misunderstood. There was no need for him to feel much afraid confronting these unarmed guests with two hundred armed Indians around him. He could have spoken Sto:lo with Toronto, but even the Chief was forbidden to speak to a ghost. Chip-kaay-am was flanked by two elders with stooped backs and forlorn eyes, each with a blouse made of woven cedar bark, one hooded, the other carrying an adze. The hooded old lady had both her legs slathered with black molasses. And even in the hands of an old woman that adze looked like a threatening tool, the way she clasped it to her breast so the stone blade glinted.

Sammy, meanwhile, continued to reason with the Chief. There seemed to be no reasoning with him. He was unflinchingly cross-armed. A Hudson's Bay blanket was draped across his shoulder and over his hands. But unlike most of his peoples, who wore cedar, the Chief was dressed in a brown wool suit that fit him well considering his full belly. He was shoeless. The feet had blackened soles. He was packed solid from the toeknuckles on up. Seven feet above, the ridge on the top of his skull was pronounced even through his full head of white hair.

Sick, said Sammy in Chinook. Hyas sick. Wagh, he said in Chinook. Piu piu, he added for emphasis.

Shem, said the Chief. Mamook isick home, he said, pointing to the waters they'd just crossed, meaning to suggest they do the trip again posthaste.

No, not, wake, said Sammy, repeating himself. Snauq kumtuks la mestin. Snauq tamahnous mamook elann Toronto.

Kowkwutl mamook elann memaloost.

Not memaloost, argued Sammy, Toronto is alive. Moosum, Sammy said, koko moosum.

Cultus wauwau, said Chip, brushing him off.

Cultus wauwau is right, said Molly, balancing herself in the canoe rim as she started to climb off the boat. I'm bored a listening to you boys talk and talk. You're never going to get anywhere with this man, Sammy. Chip-kaay-am, she said to the Chief, I'm getting off this canoe and don't get tied in a knot over it.

Wa wa, said all the Indians when they saw her begin to move.

Enough cultus wauwau, said Molly, splashing up the beach to meet the Snauq, who retreated in a kind of fear, raising their arms and trying to intimidate her even as they backed away. She turned and waved for Toronto, as if he should follow her to the shore. Toronto was not given the chance to so much as swallow before the weapons started coming out in plain sight. The Indians positioned themselves like that, ready for anything, and Molly made it obvious the performance left her unimpressed.

Molly, said her husband, I believe it's time you returned to the canoe before—

Oh, come now, Chinooky, she said.

Arrows pointed at you, said Sammy. Arrows, Chinook.

Pshaw, she said, arrows in the hands a sweethearts who never pierced more than fishscale. Toronto, will you assist me in taking Sammy's chair to the shore?

You be careful, said Sammy to his wife as she splashed back into the water, leaned over the canoe, and tried to lift up Sammy's chair. Help me, will you? she said to Toronto, and dutiful to the death, he obeyed her. He climbed off the boat, up to his knees in slippery green ribbons of seaweed. The Snauq hissed upon seeing him move, but what other choice did he have? Without the Erwagens what other life did he have? Exile. He heard the bows stretch back with arrows tracing him as he helped her lift the chair above the water and walk it onto the pebble beach. The ghost stood on the beach dripping.

Molly smoothed her half-soaked skirts and shook the water off her boots, arched her back, inhaled deeply and,
making a clownish sort of walrus mouth, blew a ringlet of damp black hair away from one of her eyes. She was right. No one took a shot at her. She took out her change purse—they flinched as if she might have a pistol—squeezed apart its brass clasp, picked through the money, and asked for a third person to help carry Sammy off the canoe. Her nerve caused a minor furor among the Snauq, and at any moment a stray arrow was going to get shot off, so before things got retributional Chip-kaay-am quieted his peoples down again. Little young genius Jack was by this point at his Chief's side. They conferred.

What is the child whispering to the Chief? asked Sammy.

Shh, said Toronto.

Whatever the child genius Jack Khatsahlahno and the Chief had conversated about, Sammy was lifted from the canoe by silent Indian men and chaperoned to the safe land of the Snauq reserve in his wheeled chair. Chief Chip-kaay-am was leading the way up the beach to the longhouse. Most of the Indians who walked beside him were unusually silent. When the road became too rutted for his wheeled chair, they carried him again. An old woman with blistered skin wobbled alongside sucking on her lip and coughing until the amount of phlegm brought her to a stop and she leaned against the wall of a salmon-smoking hut to catch her breath. There was the ghost, named Toronto in his afterlife, here walking unaccompanied through the village of his childhood, among family, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, his own mother, and still he walked alone. He was, Sammy noted, the darkest Snauq among them. He saw that Toronto was unable to resist staring down into a cedar box filled with pungent oolichan fish grease. Little Jack ran up beside Sammy and put his hand on the armrest of his wheeled chair and followed along for a few footsteps, staring into Sammy's eyes until Sammy said: Klahowya, in the voice a man uses on a child, with discipline in mind. The very next instant, a score of bumbling children in woven clothing skipped around his chair in play circles as he rolled his way to the longhouse, all of them wanting to hear the crippled Whitemans say: Klahowya.

Molly rolled her husband past a Snauq crouched on the ground fanning a pile of white ashes that gave off a hot, clear, bread-scented smoke. Her hands were a hundred years older than the rest of her, but moved nimbly over the roaming heat. Molly leaned with her shoulder to get Sammy over a slow patch of mush, and whispered in his ear: Love you. She also kissed him half on his lips, half on his cheek, and he loved her. Such was his life, highs and lows and interminable anguish. The high cedar doors of the longhouse were carved with the design of a raven's head tilted up, set inside the shape of a coin or shield. Sammy said: I'm looking forward to seeing the inside of the longhouse.