Born with a Tooth (2 page)

Michael asks me out to drink coffee most days after his teaching and continues staring at my eyes. I want to tell him that I don't think I really like coffee after all and that we should go to his house and smoke cigarettes instead. Lucky saw us and teases me at home.

“Sue hangs out with the city fuck. The skinny cocksucker thinks he's going to get some French and Indian ass at the same time, eh? He thinks the Metis like to mate, eh?” His words make me run to my room. But Lucky always knocks gently and tells me he is sorry. He says, “Metis means that you are stuck in the middle, Sue.”

Whenever he says that, I know he's going to finish his talk. He reminds me that Indians consider me a Frenchie, and whites look at me like I'm Indian. But I imagine I don't feel different from most of the rez kids. Maybe I'm lonelier. My best friend has a husband and a baby now, and another friend
moved to Thunder Bay. Tonight Lucky says he is not here enough to watch out for me and I should be careful with the city boys.

Michael has him somewhere in his house. I want to sit by Michael's stove and look at him. Michael talks a lot when we go out to the coffee shop. He tells me about Toronto, the woman mayor, the Canadian National Exhibition, the men who sleep on heating grates in the middle of winter underneath huge glass buildings. He tells me about his little brother and parents. Michael asks if he can come over to my house for dinner. He says he's writing a paper on the Aboriginals of Northern Ontario. But I can hear Lucky saying, “Do you want another potato, cocksucker?” so I say I'll go to Michael's house instead.

It's a small cottage on Ministik Road, outside the rez boundary, just a clapboard living room and a kitchen with dried flowers on the tiny table and a wood-burning stove. I help him carry wood in, and we leave our coats and boots by the stove. He cooks dinner and fumbles with the plates while setting the table. He talks a lot, asks a lot of questions about me and Moose Factory. I tell him my daddy was a full-blood Wolf Clan Cree. That he worked in the bush and was the son of a hunter. I lie and tell Michael my father was killed while hunting. I don't know why I say this. I look down at the floor, then at the walls. I don't see him.

After dinner we sit on the sofa and listen to music, drinking beer.

“You're not the most talkative person,” Michael says. “Aren't there things you want to know about me?” He leans closer and takes my hand in his. It's sweaty.

“Do you have a girlfriend in Toronto?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “There's a woman I like, but ...” and I stop his talk with a little kiss.

Lucky would be angry if he knew I was alone with Michael in his house. But Lucky's on the train tonight, somewhere near the Soo.

I want to tell this one about the other. About how close we were by the second winter. How he'd come up to me in the middle of the night almost as friendly as a dog and take gifts from my hand, then go back to the edge of the bush to eat. He wouldn't let me touch him, didn't want the smell of human on his fur. I want to tell him about that time when the ice was beginning to break up on the bay and even snowmobilers weren't crossing anymore. It was late and I offered him a strip of venison. He walked up and ignored my hand. Instead he nuzzled me hard between my legs. He could smell my blood. I felt his hot breath and tongue against my jeans for just a moment.

Michael looks awkward pulling out the sofa bed. “If I had known I'd be living like this,” he says, “I'd have shipped my futon up with me.” He's holding onto me and unbuttoning my shirt. I want to know what a futon is, but I lie back and let him struggle with my jeans.

I can feel his tongue and his breath in the dark. He's come back to me, nipping and licking, tasting me. He slides up and I can feel the hair of his chest on my belly, on my breasts. He is hard against me and pushes inside for my first time, his shoulder across my neck. The white flash of pain is his smile and dark lips. He nudges my legs wider. I bite his ear and he yelps and I can feel him release inside of me.

Michael mumbles and half talks in his sleep, so I quietly get up and pull my clothes on. The stove's gone out and I can
see my breath, so I squeak the stove door open and fill it with wood. I leave and walk down Ankerite Road, listening to my boots crunch in the snow and trees moan in the cold. Tonight it's so dark and empty I wonder if anything is alive.

The days are getting longer again. Michael and I don't go out for coffee much anymore. People in town started talking, asking why the teacher and a seventeen-year-old half-Indian girl were hanging out so much. Michael ran into Lucky and thought he was a big bearded lumberjack come to chop him down. Lucky says he didn't say a word to him. Just looked. When we do meet for coffee, this teacher doesn't look at my eyes anymore, just mumbles into his cup and watches out the window, then kisses my cheek and leaves. I wanted to tell him he was the first, but I can't now.

Sunny days leave the ice highway slushy and dangerous to cross. I only asked Michael about my wolf one time, a little while ago. I tried to sound casual and like I didn't care, but my voice came out squeaky and tense.

“That pelt, the damaged one?” he said. “I sent it out on the mail plane to my woman friend in Toronto. She loves northern stuff.”

I try not to think of my wolf anymore, sent to hang in that woman's house.

Michael calls me today after the first freighter canoe race of the year, the one from Moose Factory to Moosonee celebrating the spring. He asks me to meet him at the usual place.

“I'm leaving, back to TO,” he says as I stare out the window at the river and people on the water taxi dock. The trees
will bud soon. He lights a smoke. “I thought I might want to renew my contract and stay through the summer. But I've got business to take care of back in the city.” He smiles. A casual smile. “Besides, I hear the blackflies drive you crazy in spring. Don't worry, though. I'll write. Maybe you can come visit me sometime.”

He always talks too much. I light a smoke and look him in the eyes. He looks back for a second, then looks down and plays with his cigarette pack. I stare at him till he gets up and leaves.

The last night he visited me a few months back, I knew my wolf could smell the evil in the air. He was jumpy and his yellow eyes looked dull. I was tired and didn't want to get out of my warm bed. But I knew he was there, looking up at my window from his shadows at the tree line. I knew he wanted to see me. There was no food to offer so I poured him a bowl of milk and went outside. He sneaked up to me, then looked over his shoulder. He sniffed at the saucer but let the milk freeze. I wondered what he had done all day, if he had caught a hare or run from his enemies. Half awake and not thinking, I reached out to scratch his torn ear. I lazily ran my fingers over his scruffy head and scratched his neck. Just as I realized what I was doing, he nipped at my hand and walked away, looking back over his shoulder at me until he disappeared into the dark. He had the smell on him.

I don't like coffee anymore, but I still go to the coffee shop and drink it. When Michael left, Lucky said that the city fuck was worried the blackflies might chew his cock off if he stayed any longer.

My stomach's getting puffy so I try not to smoke, but it's become a habit. It won't be long before Mom and Lucky notice. It won't be good. I'll have to tell them soon.

When it comes, the pain will be like that night with him, and worse. I will open my legs wide and scream and curse and howl. Then the midwife will back away, muttering prayers and crying. My baby's grey furry head will enter this world. He will bare his white teeth and gnaw through our cord. He will look at me and smile with black lips and yellow eyes. He will run off into the bush, and he will cross the ice highway.

SHAWANAGAN BINGO QUEEN

S
pringtime brings the blackflies. Clouds of biting gnats that dig into your ears and nose and scalp swarm to the reserve in the first warm days to feed on us and keep us indoors for the four or five weeks that they eat and mate and die. You might not be able to see their teeth or even their little bodies crawling in your hair, but when blackflies start sucking, you know it. I remember, when I was a small girl, I was playing out back by the edge of the bush and a chainsaw scream started up in my head and sent me wailing to my mother. I put my finger in my ear and pulled it away all bloody. My mother said, “Hush, Mary,” and stuck the point of a rolled-up towel in and wiggled out three of the buggers. Then she took her bottle of rye and tipped my head sideways and poured some in. My first taste of whisky came running down my cheek, mixed with blood that I licked off the side of my face.

Sometimes I think I fell in love with my husband, Ollie, because no matter how bad the blackflies got in spring, he'd still go out and about, working on his old car or hunting in the bush. He didn't let a thing stop him. When we first married he'd get a bottle of American bourbon that had been smuggled from over the border and take me out in his little boat late at

night to look at stars and get drunk and silly. He'd take his shirt off, even if it was early spring with a sheen of thin ice forming on the lake, and stand on the bow and say, “Look, Mary, that bright one there is the dog star. It's my lucky star. Me and him, that dog, we talk to one another.” Then he'd howl out until his voice came bouncing back across the water, and I'd join in and yelp to his star and to the moon until we were both out of breath. We were young and crazy. When Ollie got killed, there was grumbling and rumours it wasn't an accident. Maybe it wasn't planned, some of the old ones said, but it wasn't no accident, either.

Then our band council brought the Bingo Palace to Shawanagan. The one road running out of the rez got paved, and Chief Roddy bought his Cadillac. The Bingo Palace changed a few things.

There are still blackflies in spring, and old Jacob the hunter still keeps our freezers full of deer meat in winter. What's changed now is we got a common focus on the rez, something to look forward to most weeknights. We got the
wasichu
driving in with their money, ready to spend it, sometimes driving all the way from Toronto. The Palace has given us a name.

Wasichu
means white man. Grandmother never had the chance to teach me the Ojibwe word, so I borrowed from the Sioux. Don't mistake me for a Plains woman, though. I'm a proud Ojibwe. The Sioux, when they came this far east, were our enemy, and we only feared and respected the Iroquois more. My grandmother spoke fluent Ojibwe, but she's dead a long time ago. Before Ollie came along, I once learned some Indian from a South Dakota boy. He was Oglala Sioux and carried it proud like his barrel chest. Even though the words
he taught me weren't my language, they were still Indian, and better than nothing, I figure. In return, I taught him to say the only Ojibwe I knew, other than swear words.
Ahnee Anishnaabe
means “Hello, Indian” in my language. One of these days I'll take a break from the Palace and learn some Ojibwe, something I can pass on to my two kids.

But what I can pass on to them now is my knowing bingo. I thought it was the stupidest game I ever heard of when word of the money started drifting in eleven years ago, with Yankee Indians in big new cars. Chief Roddy knew we were all down and out and there was no future for anyone collecting pogey and baby bonus cheques. Roddy was big enough to see that bingo might bring us some freedom.

You have to be a smooth talker to try to swing the elders in your favour, especially when you're selling something as foreign as gambling. In the end, it came down to the council elders, the old women, to decide. Roddy brought money backers in from an upstate New York rez, Iroquois with slick black hair in ponytails and three-piece suits and eagle feathers. They carried charts with red lightning zigzags on them and slide projectors under their arms.

The Iroquois dazzled our old women with talk of money for schools and autonomy. Well, we never got a school. Some built onto their houses, and many have newer cars. But you know there's still burnt-out war ponies with no windshields and most of the rez has rotted plywood and tarpaper roofs. The biggest difference when you look around is the Palace, on Centre Hill beside the rusting playground. The Palace is an old corrugated airplane hangar, insulated against winter and big enough to play a game of hockey inside, with room for spectators. There's no windows to look out onto Killdeer Lake. Just
tables and chairs to sit 450 people, and a high stage for me to call numbers from, and eight TV monitors spaced along the walls to show what ball's being called.

It used to be that the inside was filled with card tables and folding chairs, so empty and drafty that it was ugly. I learned soon enough to judge how well we were doing by the changes inside. After the first two years the cheap furniture was gone, replaced by sturdy pine cut from the bush. But the real measure is the walls. Roddy commissioned local kids to draw murals and paint pictures. Big colourful stuff showing Manitou and Indian princesses, the Sun Catcher with her buckskin arms stretched up welcoming another day, the Circle of Protecting Buffalo. One boy drew his red and black impression of a Jesuit being tortured by Iroquois. Roddy thought it would upset the
wasichu
and made the boy alter it. Now, on the wall behind the stage, there's a drawing of a Jesuit priest and an Indian warrior standing on a cloud shaking hands. Even though Ollie would have hated it, the Bingo Palace has become a nice-looking place over the last eight years.

Everyone is here to celebrate our eighth anniversary this weekend — cottagers up for the summer, townies, Indians. It's even larger than the council expected, with the chance to win a $50,000 pot and tons of advertising in advance. The money we're offering tonight is unheard of around here. A bunch of people have already come up and asked if the flyers were a misprint. “Fifty thousand dollars!” Abe from North Bay says real loud in my ear. “Goddamn if I'd ever have to work another day in my life!”