Born with a Tooth (7 page)

Oh my brothers and sisters, Painted Tongue hummed to himself. The old ways die in the face of the new. They have taken our land, broken every promise, raised the price on a pint of booze and a case of beer, made it near impossible to afford a pack of smokes. Repeat one hundred times. Write it out on the blackboard five hundred times, then sit in the corner facing away from the class and throw up between your legs.

The lake had nearly swallowed the sun now. Maybe tonight Painted Tongue would finally find Kyle Root. Kyle was the only friend he had from Cedar Point who'd made it to the city and stayed. And besides, Kyle owed him money. Kyle was a painter, an artist who could afford anything he wanted now and who lived in a loft in the warehouse district with pretty white women and pine furniture and a kitchen made of steel. Kyle wore suit jackets with his jeans, his hair combed back and neat in a ponytail held by a silver Haida thunderbird. He'd first made it big with a series of portraits of Painted Tongue:
Painted Tongue standing in a field with his bow raised to the sun, Painted Tongue leaping from a tall building and transforming into an eagle, Painted Tongue surfing a river with arms outstretched on the bow tip of a fancy canoe. Kyle was his best friend. He and Kyle used to run through summer back at the Point when they were five and six and seven, always with no shirts on, swinging lacrosse sticks and whipping pebbles at each other. They'd had a game. They'd sneak up on stray reservation dogs and smack the dogs' asses hard as they could with their lacrosse sticks. The winner was the one whose dog howled loudest. They'd always argued about which dog was uglier. Kyle used to read to Painted Tongue about their cousins, the Sioux, how they counted coup on their enemies, how they got close enough to touch them in battle. To count coup on one's enemy made the warrior a great man. Painted Tongue's stomach suddenly cramped hard, making him shiver with a closed mouth. It was time to make the circle.

He stood up slowly on the dome of his rock, humming a song to the departing sun, and got bad headspins. He stumbled and fell head-first, imagining for a moment that he was flying until the bright pain of his nose crunching on smaller rocks made him think he was swimming deep, deep under water.

Painted Tongue awoke in the hospital, surrounded by bright lights and men in green doctor's pants and nurses in white. He tried to leave quietly, but they wouldn't let him. He grew angry and hummed his war song whenever a doctor or nurse approached his cot. I will count coup upon you, skinny brown doctor man, he hummed. I am not even afraid to wrestle your fat white nurse who calls me heathen. Painted Tongue still had a righteous buzz and the pills they gave him made it roar. He
hummed louder and louder, increasing the burn of the new stitches on his nose that they had given him while he was unconscious.

You can do the paperwork if you want to call the psych ward, Painted Tongue heard one doctor say to the other as he hummed and rocked on his bed and stared them down. As he was about to leave again, a doctor who was older than the others appeared from the hall, asking, What's the problem here?

He sat on the end of Painted Tongue's bed and spoke. He was the first man in a long time who didn't speak down to him, but spoke, without staring into Painted Tongue's eyes, directly to him. You're lucky a jogger found you and called the police, the doctor said. He was white but his nose looked very much like Painted Tongue's normally did. Have you considered leaving the city and going back to your home? Why don't you stay at the Harvest House on King Street if you don't want to go home? Painted Tongue listened politely. You get drunk and hurt yourself again, and I'll make sure you get institutionalized, the doctor said before letting Painted Tongue go. He knew the doctor meant it.

All last spring, summer and winter and again into this spring, Painted Tongue had held onto the chain-link fence and watched the construction workers swarming inside a big pit below him near the waterfront. He'd hum, There are four or five good workers among you. The rest are lazy shits who don't know how to work the foremen, and the foremen don't know how to work a crew. He hummed this until the hum had become a song that he'd moan every day as the construction in the pit reached street level then grew higher with the seasons. Now the building was almost finished.

He'd watched these men from the very beginning, these sunburnt, windburnt workies straying too close to his turf by the railway tracks, these men gouging a huge empty lot until it was a pit, then framing and pouring concrete all last summer, creating a foundation for something too big, it seemed, for the earth's back to bear. Almost every day for this whole last year, Painted Tongue had taken his walk around the site's perimeter, along the sidewalk that circled it like a huge track, stepping slowly so that a footfall was timed to hit the sidewalk every two seconds. I am a well-tuned clock, Painted Tongue hummed. Left foot, stop, one-two. Right foot, stop, one-two. He'd take a long and measured stride, stop and count, then stride again, stop and count. He walked slowly, exactly, to measure the distance around the site. He walked this way to try to slow down the people rushing all around him. Everybody always seemed in a hurry. Every day he walked the same route in his manner, the crowds on the sidewalk parting like a river around a boat's hull. He ignored the odd looks and laughing and catcalls of Whisky Joe or crazy drunk or fruitcake. The people in this city were not capable of understanding.

It took Painted Tongue ninety minutes to walk the site's perimeter. He'd never witnessed so big a job, so huge a building being born from men and cement mixers and steel girders and cranes. Every day over the last few seasons the walls of the building had grown higher, as if they were being pulled by magic from the tired skin of the earth. Painted Tongue liked to stop after his walk and watch the men work; he recognized the good ones from the lazy at a distance. He was keeper of the secret of their daily progress. Now they were almost finished. The good and the lazy were almost finished.

Today Painted Tongue stood in his usual place at the site,
the start and end of his daily walk around the construction, his hands above his head and holding onto the chain-link fence. His nose throbbed from last night's fall. He brought one hand down to his nose as he stared up at the workies scrambling around on the building, the workies straining and shouting and jackhammering the last of the domed roof into place. A large white bandage over Painted Tongue's nose concealed the zigzag of six stitches running the bridge. The pain pills had made him feel almost weightless, like a crow's wing, but now they were all gone. Last night's fall had been a good thing, he thought. It had loosened up some memories in his head.

That this huge building was round as a medicine wheel was no surprise to him. Nothing in the world existed without a reason. He stared up at the white dome roof, curved like an egg, curved like something he could still not quite figure. The big sign on the other side said in blue letters as tall as a person that this was a stadium, a dome for men to play in and for spectators to cheer. For the last two months Painted Tongue had felt an ugly fear, a wolf spider, creeping up his back. All fear made no sense, and this was no different. Painted Tongue was afraid of the day the men would finish construction, of the day they would pack up their tools and leave this new thing completed. Maybe it was the falling and the pills that were now helping him to recognize just what it was the men were building. His gut tightened in awe and fear.

Painted Tongue began his slow, long strides around the structure. His nose throbbed with each step. The pills were all gone. He glanced over to the site once in a while, then looked back quickly to the ground in front of him, trying to capture the essence of this stadium in the corner of his eye. His mother had once taught him a little trick. If you are trying
to remember something, she said, and it is on the tip of your tongue, do not try to force the memory out, for very little good comes from force. Think of other things. Forget what you are trying to remember, and that memory will soon get lonely and come back to you.

Painted Tongue reached the first big curve and again peered quickly towards the dome. Nothing. He went back to the day he'd made a little boy, a small blond boy, cry. It was downtown near the entrance to First Canadian Place where Painted Tongue often sat on a piece of cardboard collecting change. He watched the boy walk along the crowded sidewalk towards him, clutching his pretty mother's hand. The boy stared at Painted Tongue, at his face and then at his paper cup containing a few coins. As they got nearer, the boy pulled on his mom's arm, trying to get her attention, trying to get her to look at the Indian crouching on the sidewalk surrounded by all the white men in business suits and the ladies who wore pretty dresses with sneakers. Painted Tongue spent his life watching. He knew from the boy's eyes all these thoughts he was thinking. The mother ignored the child's tugs.

As the two passed, the little boy held his nose. Painted Tongue screwed up his face and pursed his lips in an O, then blew hard through his mouth. He made his face mimic the Iroquois mask, the Wind Spirit, he'd once seen at the Native Canadian Centre at Spadina and Bloor. The boy's eyes widened at the sight of the man with long black hair and a warrior's crooked nose and pockmarked skin. The boy wailed in fear and Painted Tongue felt the surge along his spine. The mix of sadness and victory made him want a gulp of vodka.

He saw his own eyes in the boy's. When Painted Tongue had been one year old he'd gotten thrush. He wouldn't stop
crying. He remembered even now with his pill-fuzzy head as he walked his slow walk around the site, his mother holding him, whispering,
Gdaakwos na? Kaagiijtooge na?
Are you sick? Do you have an earache? And finally, quietly angry,
Aabiish ogaabinjibayin?
Where do you come from?

His mother told him stories later of bringing him to the reservation doctor who gave him a needle, then to the band's old medicine woman who told his mother to take him into the sweat lodge and hold him tight against her bare chest.

It wasn't until his tongue turned white that anyone figured out why he was sick. He got better and received his nickname.

Although the thrush had nothing to do with it, Painted Tongue remembered developing a lisp when he first learned to talk. The children teased him so much that he began talking less and less. By the time he left Cedar Point at eighteen, he didn't talk at all. His mother said he'd forgotten how. She was the only one who still called him by his birth name. Now, eight years later he still couldn't talk, and everyone who knew of him assumed he was dumb. Painted Tongue liked it that way.

As he neared the end of his slow walk, Painted Tongue began to grow angry that he had no booze and no money, and that whatever this goddamn building was would not show itself to him. I will blow you up, motherfucker stadium, with a thousand kilos of dynamite, he hummed. I will count coup on you, ugly concrete piece of shit. Why would anyone construct a building with a hotel and restaurants and stores and a baseball field in it? If a man desired, he could go inside and never have to come out again. It was crazy. This was a crazy fucking world.

At least the stadium was the same size. Painted Tongue walked up slowly to where he'd started his walk, staring down an ugly woman in tight shorts until she backed away from his
place along the fence, the one that offered the best view of the stadium. Back off ugly woman from this warrior on pills, he hummed. I have no booze and I am not afraid to kick a woman's ass in such a state. At least the pills gave him an appetite. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. A hot dog would be good about now. Cree Agnes from Penetanguishene would give him a hot dog. She was a good woman. And she knew Kyle. Kyle was a friend, and Kyle would have some money that he rightfully owed. But Painted Tongue needed to think of polite ways to ask him for it. Walking up Sherbourne, he thought of polite ways to ask for what was owed him. A hot dog would taste good about now, he hummed to himself.

It had been many weeks since he'd seen Kyle. Kyle had given up looking for Painted Tongue to take him out for a meal or coffee or drink a long time ago. Kyle had walked far from working construction with Painted Tongue, the first job the two had found years before when they'd driven together in the old Dodge war pony from Cedar Point to Toronto. Work was easy to find back then. Painted Tongue was as good as any goddamn man with a hammer and a level. He was never afraid to do roofing or construction way up high on a building, either. Balance and bravery were in his blood.

But Kyle had hated construction work from the beginning. It callused his fingers and left his hands too sore at night to hold a paintbrush. Most lunch breaks he'd go to whatever tavern was closest to drink beer and talk to Painted Tongue. Painted Tongue remembered those days with good feelings. Those afternoons when he first started drinking were warmer with a belly full of beer, his eyes focused only on the nails to be pounded or joists to be cut and fit or the shingles to be pulled and replaced. He and Kyle had been thrown off many
jobs for being drunk, but there had always been more jobs waiting.

Then Kyle got a fancy job in a gallery selling others' art and, after a while, his own. Now he was Big Chief in the city, and he'd given up the booze. Painted Tongue was left to find his own jobs, and the jobs got harder to find. Not many foremen wanted to hire a man who didn't talk. Kyle moved in with a pretty gallery woman, and Painted Tongue, after some decision-making, left walls and a roof on the first warm spring day two years ago to live more simply. He enjoyed living like the grandfathers, his days spent searching out food and drink, protecting himself from enemies and sitting quietly, listening to his few friends talk to him on park benches, or lying in the grass still left between the concrete buildings. He waited in winter until the heating grates of apartment buildings couldn't keep him warm anymore to search out a bed in the hostels or, if he was lucky, a reinforced cardboard box and blankets in a quiet thicket of pine in High Park. A warrior walked the earth on strong legs or else he perished. Kyle knew that too. Although he'd taken a different path, Painted Tongue was sure Kyle respected him highly for his abilities as a warrior on the streets. Kyle knew what others couldn't see. Painted Tongue had found the circle to walk, and along the route of that circle he found everything he needed to live.