Born with a Tooth (3 page)

This is the first chance Roddy's ever taken in terms of the house making it big or going bust. First the people have to come. The even bigger chance for us is whether or not
somebody walks with the $50,000 pot, the final game of the night. I've never seen Roddy so nervous before. I must admit I've got my fingers crossed, toes too. If nobody walks with the jackpot, Roddy's plans for a full casino — blackjack, craps, roulette, you name it — can go into motion.

An Iroquois rez out by Beaverton's already got a building going up with the same plan in mind. The Ontario politicians tried to stop them, and it was
wasichu
courts that declared Native autonomy. Roddy's got that silver shovel in his closet and he's ready to dig the first hole. After a big fight, he got the council to put up $25,000 when our New York Iroquois partners offered to help finance the casino deal. The Iroquois want to see if we can draw the crowds. It's now down to the money to bring in the bulldozers. Roddy told me he wants me to be a casino manager.

You couldn't ask for a better day. The blackflies are gone for the season, so the clouds and little bit of rain's made the cottagers antsy to get out and about. We open the doors at three p.m. sharp and have a buffet of casseroles and macaroni and venison. Old Blanche Lafleur from the tavern claims that, when she walked from her place to the Palace, she counted five hundred head, not including the little ones yelling and darting among the grown-ups.

Saturday nights were never like this seven years ago when I first got a job working bingo after Ollie died. Word of our Palace hadn't spread yet when Roddy hired me on at the snack counter. I worked my way up to official stage caller pretty quick, faster than I ever imagined. It's quite a thing to sit above the crowd and pull balls from the air popper and hear the hush when you call. Tonight won't be much different. As six o'clock comes near it looks like every chair in the house is taken and
people have got their sheets of cards spread in front of them and are arranging all their doodads and charms.

You've never seen such a strange sight — troll dolls with bright pink or green hair shooting up from their heads, pieces of lucky clothing or real child hair and baby teeth. And daubers, lots of coloured bingo daubers. Most serious players always have a handful lined up, although it takes a lot of plugging away to run a dauber's ink dry. The stylish ladies carry all their bingo gear in crocheted bags. A few even have authentic-looking wampum pouches, made from moose hide with beaded Indian scenes on them.

I notice that the teenagers form their own group along the far wall. They've got torn jeans and long hair and pretty designs on their T-shirts. They're mostly rez kids, Johnny Sandy, Veronica Tibogonosh, and Earl Thibadeau among them. A few years ago, a lot of the more troublesome ones, the tricksters in the group, used to show up and do things like call, “Bing –” and then “Oh-oh,” a few seconds later, like they mistook winning a game. The older ones didn't like that, I tell you, white or Indian. Don't ever cross a player and her game. It's like spitting on someone's religion. The Indians never hushed up the trickster kids. It always seemed to be the old white ladies with thin lips making snake noises against their wrinkled fingers. Roddy finally chased the bad ones out. I don't know exactly what he did or said, and I'm not sure I want to know. But there isn't much trouble during the games anymore.

Tonight I notice a woman and her husband bring their little ones in to sit with them while they get ready to play. My floor runner, Albert, goes over, and it looks like he's telling them that children aren't allowed in during the games. You never
saw people leave in such a huff. I've never seen the family in here before, and don't expect to again any time soon.

That's one of the disagreements my husband, Ollie, had with the band council so many years ago. Roddy tried to sell bingo as a business good for the whole community when Ollie started up his petition of names against it. Ollie knew there was no room for the rez kids in the Palace. In the final band vote, his big opposition speech ended with talking about our Rachel and Little Ollie. It made a stir with the older ones, but the Palace was like a black bear waking in spring, too hungry to stop.

Ollie didn't live long enough to see bingo run on the rez. He died when he fell out of a tree. He was way up, near the top of a big pine, sawing dead wood threatening to come down during the next thunderstorm. A cottager had offered him fifty bucks for the job. The cottager was an old man then, but seems much older now when I occasionally run into him at the trading post or in town. He still sends me a prayer card every year.

It's funny, you know. Even now I sometimes don't believe Ollie's gone. He was always falling out of trees or driving his snowmobile too late in spring and going through the thin ice or tearing the hull of his boat on a shoal at night. But he crawled back into our bed, wet and cold or scratched up, telling me another story. After all these years it still doesn't sink in that nobody saw Ollie fall out of the tree or gasping for breath for half an hour with a branch through his stomach like the coroner told me. Ollie's luck ran out. I think the rumours are just Ollie's spirit flying around on the wind at night, stirring up trouble and rattling the pine branches.

There wasn't much time for mourning with Little Ollie and Rachel at home. Little Ollie remembers a few things about
his daddy but Rachel was only two when it happened. That bothers me a lot, the fact they'll never know him.

Roddy knew I never liked the idea of living off government money, that I hated the idea as much as Ollie did. After the funeral, Roddy offered me the job on the snack counter at the Palace. The thought of Ollie looking down from his star and shaking his head, disappointed that I sold myself out to something like bingo, bothered me. It always will. But it wasn't my fault that he left us early, and it seems to me that working is better than welfare. And I'm a hard worker. I moved up quick and ignored the grumbling from the others who worked the Palace till midnight and drank till dawn. Once I heard one of the townie kids call me Mary Goody Two-Moccasins. I bitched him out good.

The Palace chatters like a forest full of grosbeaks when I walk up and take my seat by the popper, on the stage a good four metres above the crowd. It's a bird's-eye view through the haze of smoke rising to the rafters. The noise stops with the croaking and fumbling of my mike, and you'd think a priest had walked in to say church or a judge to read the sentence. There are no empty seats. Even stragglers lean on walls or sit on the floor, arranging.

“Welcome to the Shawanagan Bingo Palace,” I say. “As a lot of you know, Queen or King for the night wins ten dollars every time their ball number comes up in play this evening. Please refer to the lottery ticket you received with admission.” I call out the number and wait for the winner. Old Barb from Magnetawan stands up and calls out, “I am Queen of the Shawanagan Bingo Palace!” Albert runs out and puts the red felt bandanna on her head. Old Barb looks very proud. People all around nod to her. It's a serious business. I make a note that
her ball is B-6. All Barb has to do is call out, “Pay the Queen,” whenever her number is announced in a game and Albert runs over and gives her ten bucks. It can add up.

I jump right into the Early Bird Special, with two games of straight bingo and two games of Full Card X. It gets the interest up and people loosened for the night. I call the balls even and a little slow, holding them in front of the camera attached to the monitors long enough that the older ones who can't hear too well have enough time to squint out the numbers. I notice a lot of regulars in the audience tonight. There's Barb smiling away in her red bandanna and the Burke's Falls Lions Club gang with their matching shirts. I notice that even the Judge came out tonight. I gave him up for dead a while ago. He's a retired lawyer from Toronto who moved up here alone. We call him “Judge” because he uses a dauber shaped like a gavel and pounds away all serious at his cards like he's ordering the court to silence. The Early Bird winners walk with or split a hundred dollars a game.

One hundred dollars seemed like a fortune to me back when Ollie and I married. He was never much for government handouts, even though there were plenty of days we needed cash. Ollie was a wagon-burner, for sure. He sniffed out trouble and rolled in it faster than a hunting dog. He liked to piss people off. I met him at fifteen and could see it in his eyes. He'd hitchhiked into our rez from the Quebec interior and decided he liked the lake. So he stayed. But he could use a chainsaw and drive a logging truck, so he wasn't much of a burden. Old Jacob took Ollie under his wing and taught him about fishing and hunting. Jacob is a legend around here. He feeds most of the rez through the harder months. One winter Ollie and him bagged seventy deer and fed a lot of mouths through to spring.

Then Ollie got a crush on me. He claimed it was a vision he had after hiking to Moosejaw Mountain, which isn't so much a mountain as a heap of old quarry stone, and he got stuck there a couple days after his lunch bucket ran dry.

I'll never forget the day he walked back onto the reserve, shouting that he was a man now, that he'd had his first true vision — one of a large brown animal whispering my name in his ear as he lay naked and sweating on a rock.

I laughed at Ollie from my doorstep, so he left and I didn't see him again for two weeks. When he came back, his chest had swelled bigger. Ollie made sure to tell all my girlfriends that he had hitched the five hundred kilometres up to Moose Factory in pursuit of his vision, knowing it would get straight back to me. I'll tell you now I didn't like the idea of a moose popping up in Ollie's head whenever he thought of me. We ended up marrying a year later.

After a game of Four Corners and a game of Make a Kite, I call intermission. Tonight Jan What's-Her-Face comes and gabs in my ear like usual. She's a
wasichu
cottager who wears “Free Leonard Peltier” or “American Indian Movement” T-shirts. Jan tells me that last night she had a vision in her dreams. The vision told her the winning combination of balls I would call in the jackpot game, and she looks forward to seeing if her vision was worthy.

“I always get such a feeling of freedom when I drive onto your reservation,” she says, and takes my arm in her hands. “Just imagine winning $50,000. That would be freedom too.”

She's only a summer cottager. Her place up here isn't even winterized. I wonder what she'd think about freedom, stuck in the house when it's thirty below and the walkie-talkie tells you the road won't be cleared for days.

Between the two intermissions we play Block of Nine, Anywhere, Half Diamond and Full Diamond games. They're simple enough, but I see people's focus is on the cards. There's not much chit-chat while play's in progress. The winnings are too big. Albert runs and hands out $2,000 before I call intermission again.

Bingo calling's like any other job in that it can get boring after a while. I learned to pass my time on the stage every night watching faces and goofing around, calling numbers too fast and laughing inside at all the eyes looking up at me like panicked raccoons in car headlights. Or I'll call real slow for a long while, listening for just the right moment when people are chatting and not paying attention. That's when I call a few balls super-fast and listen for the angry wail of “Call again,” or “Bad bingo.” Ollie would have laughed at that.

But tonight there's no fooling around. Roddy paces the floor like an anxious bear, his black braided ponytail flopping almost to his bum.

Our Shawanagan Special tonight is the biggest ever. If you want to play, you have to buy special strips at $5 a pop, but the winner walks with a guaranteed $4,000. We have to sell eight hundred cards just to break even. Roddy decides to leave the cashier box open a couple of extra minutes despite cries of “Let's play,” and “Get on.” From where I sit, with all the scurrying about and money changing hands, we'll break even. But you're never positive until the accounting's done at the end of the night.

Roddy comes up to me before I start play again. “Remind the crowd about the jackpot game tonight, Mary,” he says. As if they need to be reminded. I clear my throat and switch on the mike.

“Let me just tell you about tonight's jackpot game.” Everyone goes real quiet and stares up at me. “The game is included with your admission price. You can buy extra cards at $25 a pop. Jackpot game is fill your card in forty calls or less and win $50,000. In forty-one calls, $40,000. In forty-two calls, $25,000. In forty-three calls, $15,000. In forty-four calls or more, $5,000.” I see the glow in people's eyes. It's an addiction.

“The point isn't to win, it's to win big!” Roddy tells the Palace workers at our meetings. “You either lead, or you follow, or you get out of the way.” It's a good scare tactic but doesn't leave much room to argue. I sometimes take a walk and look around the rez and wonder.

I was out walking with Little Ollie and Rachel when I heard about Ollie. Ernest, the band's police chief, roared up in a dust cloud. When he got out of his Bronco, he looked sad and red-eyed.

“I got bad news, Mary,” he said. “Come here away from the little ones for a minute.” I remember thanking him for telling me, and walking the kids down the dirt road to the pond Ollie always took them to.

“Daddy can't take you fishing here no more,” I said. “Or to school or out in the bush.” Their deer eyes looked up at me. Little Ollie figured it out fast and ran away on his skinny legs, his sneakers slapping up puffs of dust on the road. Rachel cried and wanted her brother to come back.

Little Ollie isn't so little anymore. He's eleven now and he blames Roddy but can't reason it out exactly why. I tell my boy that it was his father's time to go to
Gitchi-Manitou
, that he's up in the sky as a twinkling star now, looking down at us. The few rumours are just rumours. But my boy fights it. He's not named after his dad for nothing, I figure.