Born with a Tooth (6 page)

Jenny walked into the living room where the others sat. Anne nervously smoked a cigarette and checked over the set list.

“Okay, we open with ‘Thirty-Something Wasteland,' right?” Tina asked as she drummed her thighs with her sticks. “What comes after that?”

“Don't worry,” Anne mumbled from a cloud of smoke. “You'll have a set list taped by your kit.”

Jenny looked over to Bertha. She sat on a big chair, her feet not quite touching the floor, quiet and still as a small stone. “You okay, Bertha?” Bertha's nod back wasn't too convincing. “Well, Sisters, time to head to the beach,” Jenny said, trying to sound chipper, the words coming out shaky.

Jenny suddenly realized that, without anyone actually saying it out loud, all of the Sisters had chosen their original stage dress. As they stood up and headed towards the door, the band's classic look — black combat boots, black torn jeans and black T-shirts — somehow calmed her. They were ready to do battle. Sure, the black didn't exactly have the slimming effect that it had had ten years ago. But there was no getting around the fact that they looked intimidating, a stocky army of women on the warpath, despite all the procreation the other three had been involved in. A little blocky, maybe pudgy, but still intimidating. As Jenny walked down the steps towards the waiting van, she felt the tight tug of her jeans. She'd never had babies, so what was her excuse?

The Sisters stood in the shadows on the stairs leading up to the stage's side, Serious Henry crooning sadly above their heads. The crowd appeared monstrous from this angle, hundreds and hundreds of people stretching back along the beach, right to the water's edge two hundred metres away. The beer tent along the side was wall-to-wall weekenders and locals. Half the audience listened intently; the drone of talking and laughing and hooting rose from the other half, mingling with Henry's melancholy voice. When he stopped singing, though, the crowd erupted in claps and cheering. Henry tipped his cowboy hat to the audience and, through the roaring, mumbled, “Thank you. Thank you very much. Please stick around for Sisters of the Black Bear.”

The Sisters nodded to Serious Henry as he exited the stage and walked down past them, tipping his hat again. Jenny watched the roadies running around the stage, pulling apart Henry's shiny equipment and lugging out the Sisters' battered and sad-looking gear.

Anne handed Jenny a mickey of rye, and Jenny tipped it up and took a big gulp. The horrible taste made her gag. It was fully dark now, and the event coordinator came up to brief them quickly. “You've got a full hour and a half to do your thing, ladies,” he said. Jenny thought that if he had whiskers he'd look like a little white rat. “You got a real happy crowd out there. I was told it's the biggest Mosquito Beach turnout ever. You can go on any time now.” He walked down the steps and hurried off.

“Give us the set lists,” Tina said.

Anne's mouth dropped. “Oh my god. I left them at your mother's house.”

Jenny felt her stomach sink to somewhere below the tight waist of her jeans. “It's okay,” she said, before a panic attack could wash over her. “We basically know exactly what we're going to play. Just keep the communication lines open onstage. We'll be fine.” The Sisters walked onstage, into the bright lights and small roar of the crowd.

Jenny felt as if she might be floating towards the microphone, the blood rushing in her ears, until she stumbled on a wire snaking across her path. She straightened up and muttered, “Good evening, folks,” into the mike, but no sound echoed across the audience. The damn thing wasn't turned on. She fumbled along its shaft and hit the switch. The microphone squealed to life and Jenny tensed at the feedback. “We're Sisters of the Black Bear,” she said, her voice booming shakily across
the crowd, “from right here on Turtle Stone Rez. Welcome to the Maul.”

There was a short silence. Jenny had been hoping that this would be enough cue for the Sisters to kick into their first song. She looked back and saw that Bertha wasn't ready yet, was still strapping on her guitar. The crowd grew silent. Jenny looked out through the lights and smiled meekly. “We thank you for coming,” she muttered, feeling her face begin to burn. None of the Sisters had ever been in front of so giant a crowd. She could feel a thousand eyes staring at her. She looked back again. Bertha gave her the nod and started strumming into the first song. The rest of the band joined in, so slow it seemed they were playing under water. Jenny leaned towards the mike, closed her eyes to the glare and opened her mouth to sing. Nothing came. She'd completely blanked on the lyrics. She felt the band tense up behind her.

They kept playing the song heroically. She stepped back from the microphone as casually as she could, turned around and looked at them helplessly. Anne had her head down, hiding behind her veil of hair, her fingers picking out the notes. Bertha stared at her with a doe's eyes, unsure whether to keep playing or not. Tina glared from behind her drum kit, not caring, from the sound of it, if she was even keeping time. Jenny shrugged and made an apologetic face to them. The song whined down and petered out.

Jenny stepped back to the mike and half whispered, “We call that one ‘Thirty-Something Wasteland' ... uh ... we try to make our music match our feelings on the issue.” A few people laughed. A fat man close to the front of the crowd shouted loudly and drunkenly, “That sucked!” He got more laughs from the crowd.

Jenny reddened. She made his face out through the bright stage lights. He was a true grub. “This next one's called ‘Scalp The Fat Drunk.'” The crowd hooted, which made her feel a little better. Anne nudged her. She still had her hair covering her face.

“Don't sweat it, Jenny,” she whispered. “Let's do ‘Smoke Signals.' You're real good at that one.”

The crowd was restless, talking and laughing quietly. The tone reminded Jenny of a wake. “This is where we start for real,” she said into the mike. “This one's called ‘Smoke Signals,' and it's dedicated to all the politicians blowing smoke up our collective asses.”

The same heckler shouted, pointing up to the stage, “You could blow a lot of smoke up those girls' big collective asses, eh?” Jenny stared down at him. He'd taken his shirt off and wrapped it around his head. His hairy belly jiggled as he laughed with his sunburnt friends. The band kicked into the song. It was supposed to have a tribal rhythm, a beating of the war drum, but Tina was so nervous that she was sounding like an epileptic having a seizure. Jenny leaned to the mike again and began singing scratchily. It was hard to find the beat with the ringing in her ears.
There's smoke signals in the sky
, she quacked, her voice shooting back at her from her monitor,
There's little reason asking why
. This new song was pathetic. All of them were.
It's big industry polluting the sky / Leaving another child left to cry....

Jenny was grateful when the song finally ended. A smattering of applause. The audience refused to make eye contact with the band.

“Now Glenn Miller had a big band,” the fat grub up front shouted to his buddies, making sure to shout loudly enough for
Jenny and everyone else to hear too, “but I guess you'd call these chicks a
really
big band.” Nervous twitters from people around him. “Hey, what's your band's name? The Bear Sisters?” Jenny noticed that his few remaining friends were polite enough to turn away from her to laugh.

Jenny walked over to Anne. The crowd didn't seem to know what to do with itself. “Do the instrumental,” Jenny said to her. “‘Powwow Highway.' It might get the crowd dancing.” Anne nodded her hair-covered face, then walked to Tina, then Bertha. They kicked into the song as Jenny walked back to the front of the stage, dangling her microphone so that it nearly touched the ground. She tapped her foot to the music and stared down at the fat man. He stared back at her, smiling, centre stage and six or seven metres dead ahead. The crowd had cleared a small space around him, and he danced theatrically, sticking his tongue out at Jenny and rubbing his belly.

Jenny smiled back and began to swing her mike in a slow circle, like a stripper with a feather boa. A couple of guys hooted. The band picked up the pace. They actually sounded tight, hitting the right chords hard, surfing along the fast tempo. Jenny swung the microphone faster. The fat man gestured to himself with both hands, mouthing, “Oh, baby,” to her. Jenny was whirling the mike on the end of its cord, picking up speed, as the song reached its crescendo. When the man reached down and squeezed his crotch in mock seduction, Jenny let the mike fly; it sailed like a silver arrow aimed true towards the man. He was still grinning when it hit him square in the forehead with an amplified and hollow BONG.

Jenny pulled the microphone back in, hand over hand, the screeching of feedback a nice touch, she thought, to the end of the song. She placed the mike back in its grip and stared down
at the man. He was sitting on his ass like a fat child, rubbing his forehead. Jenny was halfway to the stage stairs when the clapping started. Just the smack of maybe ten hands together at first. It quickly multiplied so that, by the time she reached the stairs there were hundreds and hundreds of hands clapping, voices rising in shouts and whistles, a beach packed with admirers demanding more. Jenny looked back to the Sisters. They were still standing in place, dumbly staring out at the sea of noise.

There was nothing else to do; Jenny ran back to the mike and shouted, “This one's called ‘Burning Down the Bingo Hall.' Hit it, Sisters.” Jenny growled into the mike as they kicked in fast and hard behind her.
The Bingo Hall's burning / The Bingo Hall is burning / The Bingo Hall is popping balls and it's burning hot tonight.

Within a minute a mosh pit had formed, swallowing up the fat man, forty or fifty crazed and happy cottage kids jumping in a circle around him like movie Indians, pumping their fists in the air and howling along. More and more people joined in. Jenny grabbed the mike off the stand and paced the stage, spitting out her words, the words a tribal roar now, flying above the guitar and bass and drums. She spotted Ma on the right, back a ways from the melee and leaning against a birch tree. Wiry grey hair bobbing, Ma tapped her foot fast as she could to the music, grinning big.

SOUTH

Ruin

PAINTED TONGUE

P
ainted Tongue cocked his ear to a loon calling from the lake, and it was like a dream, the sound dancing across the big water, the water pulling the sun into it. He laughed to himself.

I must not talk like Grandfather. Repeat one hundred times. I drink, therefore I am. Repeat. Write it one hundred times on the blackboard, then sit in the corner facing away from the class.

He laughed to himself again, then took a swig from his mickey of vodka. There was nothing left, so he sucked on the brown bag that held the bottle. He rocked on his boulder and sucked on the bag and hummed a song that his mother used to sing to him at Cedar Point.

Gnooshenyig
go tobogganing. Your grandchildren go tobogganing.
Nooshenyig
go tobogganing. My grandchildren go tobogganing.

The words knotted around themselves before they left his tongue, so he flattened the letters with his damaged mouth and turned them into a hum that increased in tone until the sound echoed back across the water towards the loon. Painted Tongue hummed louder to remember his mother's song until the story

in the song came back to him, the story of children sledding and falling through the weak ice of a river, the song of warning to children who acted foolishly with friends who didn't listen to the warnings of their mothers. He was drunk. He had a righteous buzz and wanted a drink. He wanted a drink so bad it made him shake, but the humming helped stop the shakes for a little while at least.

The boulder that he sat on was his boulder.

Let someone try to take it away, goddammit. I will cut your throat from ear to ear and count coup upon you, motherfucker.

This was his boulder on the lake, removed from the confusion of downtown, the rock heavy and squat and thick with a little natural chair cut into it at such an angle that he didn't have to see the ugliness of people, just the water and the sun dancing upon the water. This was Painted Tongue's rock, and he'd defended his turf against stinking hobo invaders. He'd counted many coup against them with rocks and broken bottles and his fists, and now this was his rock. Painted Tongue stopped his humming as a jogger in very white sneakers ran by behind him along the railroad tracks, the jogger turning his head away from this man who defended his rock, this man with long straight black hair and the crooked nose of a warrior.

You are a coward! Painted Tongue wanted to shout. The way you turn your eyes from me as you cross my rock. Don't run near here anymore.

When the man had run away, Painted Tongue cocked his ear again, this time to the clang and chug of a train leaving the train yard far to his left. The five thirty p.m. Go Train express to Oshawa. A warrior didn't need a clock to tell him what time it was. All he needed was to listen and watch the things around him.

When the sun was gone he would make his way back downtown to hustle change with his cup. His bottle was long empty and his lips were dry, and soon it would be time for dry lips to move downtown. Everything travelled in a circle. The sun, the moon, joggers, the world. Today already Painted Tongue had been hustling change at the corner of Dundas Street and Bay. He'd made enough by mid-afternoon to buy the mickey of vodka. He'd walked down Bay and underneath the moan and echo of the expressway, across the train tracks and to the crown of his boulder, far enough away from the electricity and noise of downtown, to where he could imagine for a time that he was back at home, back in the bush. And very soon he'd do his route again. Life hadn't always been this way, but memories of the rez dropped as fast as the sinking sun.