Born with a Tooth (11 page)

There was a time years ago when Antoine experienced a bad sickness. He doesn't talk about it much, only told me about it once. He got sick so that he didn't want to get out of bed. Kids came at night and threw pebbles at his window or scratched tree boughs across it so that he might be fooled into thinking it was a bear. Drunks would show up in the early hours and talk to one another outside his door. Antoine bolted his door by jamming knives into the crack between the door and frame. He didn't want kids or drunks seeing him when he was sick like that. He lay on his couch for a week, sipping only water and sleeping bad.

At the end of that week, the Lord came with two helpers. They were all dressed in black suits with white button shirts. The Lord sat by Antoine for a long time, holding his hand and talking to him in Cree about scripture. The Lord talked and Antoine listened while the helpers boiled tea and swept the place out and fixed a couple of broken chairs and taught
themselves to make tamarack birds using one of his as a model.

“I want you to believe in me,” the Lord told Antoine. “My name has been used to pit Indian against Indian, and I don't like that. You can help me make a difference here.” Antoine thought about that for a long time, and finally nodded his head OK. “I'm going to give you a special gift,” the Lord told Antoine. “I guess you could call it that. You can see into people, see what is bothering them. It might be physical sickness. It might be something in their thoughts. I want you to believe in me.”

Antoine nodded. The Lord and his helpers left. Antoine felt better not long after that and got up. The knives were still in the exact place he'd left them.

That was a long time ago and, even though he never talks of that incident, Antoine's reputation as a medicine man has grown. He's one of the few people with the respect of both the Christian and the old-school Indians around here. As he hands me a blue tin mug of tea, I know he knows something is up with me. He's good at that. I used to try and mask what I felt in the past, acting happy and silly when I was sad, quiet when I had good news to share. He always knows, though.

“He's back, eh?” Antoine says, sitting down in his chair by the stove.

“Yeah,” I answer. “Me and Raymond and Michael beat him up today, too.”

“I know,” Antoine says. I look at him. His powers are getting strong in his old age. “My nephew came by and told me,” he says. “There's no such thing as a secret on this reserve. Only old news.”

“He hit Gloria,” I say. “I had no other choice but to do what
I did. Dink knows that.” Antoine looks at me with that look on his face, the one that says, “You're still just a novice.”

“He's not the same Dink you helped to raise,” Antoine says. “He started out different from what you wanted him to be, a long time before his
papanoowin
down south.” He stops talking for a while, gets up and refills his mug.

“What do I do?” I ask.

“You avoid him, Xavier Bird,” Antoine says, giving me a rare look straight in the eyes.

“What? You believe in this bearwalker thing?” I ask.

“You can't see electricity, and you might not know much about why it works, but it's there. It lights up your house. And if you aren't careful with it, it can kill you.”

Now I get up and refill my tea. It's my turn to wait for him to talk.

“Nature's full of things that aren't good or bad. They just are. Storms, sun, lightning, animals. There are a lot of forces that are neutral, but when they fall into certain hands they can become good or bad. It depends on how the user wants to use them. You can train a dog to be friendly or mean.”

“But do you believe in this bearwalking?” I ask again. “When I shot a bear for the first time, I cried when my father and me skinned it. When you remove a bear's fur, when you take its clothes off, it looks just like a man. The old people believed in a bear spirit that was related to us.” I look at Antoine in frustration. He begins to talk of hockey after a while and I know it's impossible to get him to tell me any more.

When I'm walking back along the railway tracks, I think about what Antoine said. It's hard to picture Dink harming me. The world just doesn't work that way. There's a hierarchy to
things, and Dink was born lower on the food chain than most of us.

I don't feel like going home so I go by Christine's house to see what the gang's up to.

“You beat up Dink good, eh?” Elijah says. “I can't believe he hit Gloria.”

“We didn't raise him to do something like that,” Jeremy says. Christine shakes her head at the thought of such a thing.

“What do you think came over him?” she asks. “All that talk about magic, and his car!”

“I think it looks cool,” Jeremy speaks up. “Every time I see it, it makes me think we should get a casino on the reserve and get with the times.”

“Hey!” Christine shouts. “That reminds me. Let's go to the arena tonight. Big bingo.”

I'm not much for bingo, but everyone else seems excited so I go along. The arena's crowded. The concrete surface where the ice is in winter is filled with tables. At centre ice the calling booth sits up on a square stage. People cluster in little groups and talk, waiting for the night's entertainment to begin. We get ourselves a table back to the left of the visiting team's goalie crease. I didn't realize the bingo was such a big deal tonight. The jackpot's for five grand, which is a lot bigger than usual.

Christine's got a dauber in each of her hands. We've had to arrange two chairs for Jeremy to hold his immense weight, one for each cheek. He leans over his card, his breath loud and raspy. Elijah, on the other hand, can't keep still. He's the one who's like a mink, thin and long and always jittery. He flicks his daubers like drumsticks as the caller calls out the first game.

Shortly into the game, a familiar voice calls out, “Bingo,” and me only needing an I and one O to win. I look across the smoky arena and see that it's none other than Dink himself, wearing dark sunglasses. He's got his hair all slicked back with some sort of grease, looking like an Indian Elvis impersonator. Christine lets out a loud squeak when she sees it's Dink who's won. When Elijah and Jeremy see who it is, they both say, “Holy Wah!” at the same time. The caller has his runner verify the card, and when it's called good bingo there's some polite applause that's quickly drowned out by the chatter of the gossip. To my surprise, Dink actually gets up and bows. I've never seen such a hairdo in real life before.

Dink wins the third, fifth and sixth game and people are really talking now. I can see some of the old Catholic women crossing themselves when they look in his direction. Nobody seems too surprised when, ten minutes into the big jackpot game of the evening, Dink calls bingo again, getting up to take his little bow. I work out quickly that he's won almost seven thousand dollars. There's grumbling from one half about some kind of cheating going on, and the other half mumbles about some strong, bad medicine on reserve. I write it off to luck and consequence. After all, didn't a similar thing happen to Barb Blueboy a couple years ago?

Regardless of what other people have decided, no one is talking to Dink. It's as if he gives off some bad but barely noticeable scent, like the smell of sickness coming on, that nobody wants to be around. He leaves by himself, climbing into that orange Pinto, his pockets bulging with hundreds.

The days pass and things quiet down. Last I heard, Dink's gone off to the bush. No one's seen him, and I know he can stay out there long as he wants before he decides to come in.

Gloria stays at my house because it's the quietest. She's climbed into some dark corner I've never seen her in before. She doesn't want to talk to anyone or see her friends. Mother says a wounded heart needs time alone. I'm worried there's more to it than that.

I spend some time out fishing with Antoine. We talk of plans for the summer now that it's upon us. Antoine's got it in his head that he wants to go down to Toronto, see a big city for the first time. “I'm not going to be around forever, Xavier,” he says. “There's things I've seen in pictures or on a TV that I want to see in real life. I would like to go up on that tower they got down there, stand on its balcony and look out at the sky. Pretend I'm an eagle.”

“You'd hate it down there,” I tell him. “All the cars and people always rushing around.”

“I don't want to live there, Xavier. I just want to see it for once.”

A week after the bingo, Dink's back from the bush, tearing around in his Pinto, spending money like crazy. His hair's grown even higher on his head. Elijah, who's knowledgeable of such things, says the hairdo's called a pompadour, and the rumour around town is that Dink keeps it up like that with spit and hairspray. A man using hairspray! Who's ever heard of such a thing!

Something's happened to him while out in the bush. It's like he's grown bigger. Not physically, necessarily, although he does look stronger. It's like he's grown in self-esteem. You can see it in his walk. It used to be he'd slink around like a beat dog, but now he walks with his head high, talking to anyone who'll listen. And what he says! I've heard from a few people that he's laughing at what my brothers and I did to him, saying
that the beating only served to release more power in him. He's bragging to people that he managed to shape-shift into a bull moose while out in the bush, that he crashed through the trees all night and rutted with a cow moose at dawn by a patch of muskeg. He's told others that he turned into a crow and flew over the reserve a few days ago. He told Zachary Goodwin about the sturgeon he was pulling out of the river at the time, and told Old Lady Koostachin next door that the hole in her roof's peak is getting bad. All she did was bless herself and walk away. Dink has her spooked now.

People have started talking again. They always do. The old ones in the community, led by Old Lady Koostachin, began claiming they could see the black wings of death silently flapping about Dink's head. Other elders claimed it was
Weesageechak
, the trickster himself, who'd taken his body over. How else to explain the talk, the hair, this new, proud Dink?

I began keeping an eye on him. Not spying, exactly, but keeping track of what he was up to. Part of Dink's talk was about getting Gloria back. She was his first love, he was telling people, and she'd be his last. Gloria was his soulmate, so he claimed. I wasn't going to let him get his hands on her again.

Dink followed a certain circular route every day, I soon found out. You could find him in the mornings at the trading post, talking. But people are avoiding him more and more. If no one was around, he'd wander through the magazine section, buying whatever caught his eye — hot rod magazines, ones on fishing, women's beauty magazines, crossword puzzle books. Whenever something new came in, he'd buy it. In the afternoon he was at the Northern Store, wandering the women's underwear section, touching the silky things and smiling to himself or juggling cans of Klik in the food aisle for the little kids. He
bought many things here, too. Canned goods, camping equipment, an expensive fishing rod and tackle, a big shiny Buck knife. Late in the afternoon he'd follow the railway tracks away from Antoine's and disappear into the bush. I could never find where he was camping out. All the time I was following him, I knew he knew I was doing it. Trying to hide from him would have been pointless. He's too good a hunter.

I was following the tracks to Antoine's a little while later. The sun was starting to lose its heat and the shadows were getting longer. To the left and behind me I could hear something walking lightly, maybe a dog or fox, from what I could figure. It followed for just a while, then I heard it move quicker till it was ahead, then gone. Not a minute later, Dink stepped out from the bush. He walked to the tracks and turned to face me. We both stopped and looked at one another.

“Why you following me, Xavier?” he called out.

“I'm thinking of making a documentary on shape-shifters,” I answered. “Their territory, their habits.” I could see Dink tense up at the mention. It really gets under his skin when we tease him. He's always been sensitive that way.

“Don't follow me anymore, Xavier,” he shouts to me when he gains his calm.

“Not till you stop mentioning my sister's name and forget about her,” I answer.

“I love her and she loves me,” he shouts.

“She doesn't love you, Dink. In fact she hates what you've become, all your bullshit. You beat her up, you asshole.” I'm beginning to get angry.

“I didn't want to hit her. I blacked out when I did it.”

“You're using drinking for an excuse?”

“I wasn't drinking. I just black out sometimes and don't remember nothing when I wake up. It's part of what I'm becoming.”

“Don't use your excuses with me, Francis,” I say calmly. “Gloria's already made it clear that you're not part of her life. You don't exist anymore where she's concerned.”