In the Land of Birdfishes (22 page)

“It’s just a story,” she said softly. She didn’t even hesitate.

“My mother,” I said.

I was sitting on the floor now and she squatted down in front of me, put her hands on my feet, but I wouldn’t look at her. “You really believe that?” she asked. “I don’t know where the dead go or what they think about there. But I think the dead must be very, very tired. I think they must stop worrying about us. Maybe they just sleep. Wherever they go, they just sleep there.”

“You believe that?”

“I don’t believe anything. But I don’t think the dead are thinking about us.”

I woke up in the night, on the floor, cold. Something broken was sticking in my back. I stood up and realized why I’d woken. Through the window, snow was falling, blowing in on a wind, dropping lightly on the floor. The wind was icy,
and the night was ink black. I would tell Angel in the morning about the snow and she would say it was a dream. She would lie to me.

As long as I could remember, I’d wanted to leave this town. The way my mother hated it made me hate it. The way my father loved it made me hate it. I didn’t know how the town wouldn’t want me to leave. How it pulled at me. Pulled me back every time I left.

The first time I left, I was halfway to Whitehorse before I noticed what was happening. Every mile I drove, my truck got a little heavier. I stopped a couple times, thinking maybe I blew a tire. But there was nothing wrong with the truck. By the time I crossed the border, it was too heavy to turn or keep straight and it kept swinging for the shoulder of the road. It wasn’t till I parked the truck outside a motel in Fort Nelson and pulled my duffle bag out of the back that I realized what the problem was. It was me. I didn’t look any bigger, but I weighed more than the moon.

Three times I left, and I lasted as long as I could. But it got so bad I could hardly stand. I would wake in the morning and not be able to pry my body from the bed. I went back home, and the higher I climbed on the map, the lighter I got, till my truck was almost flying off the road, and I was so angry I could cry.

I woke so early there was hardly any light between the curtains I’d forgot to close. Angel was still asleep in my bed. I left her there and went to Aileen’s door.

“Get up,” I told her.

She was already awake, sitting at the edge of the mattress with her back to me. “What? Why? What’s going on?”

“You said you wanted to see the claim.”

She stood up and went to the window. “Not today, Jason.”

And I didn’t blame her and didn’t know why I wanted to go either, except not to be there when Angie woke up. But I said, “Get your clothes on if you’re coming.” And then I waited in the truck with the engine running until she came.

Driving down the dirt road to the site, I took the turns hard and liked the way I’d get thrown against the door or her each time, and how every bump I hit set us loose from our seats till we banged down into them again. I liked how she knew not to complain.

I parked in front of the excavator, beside the pit. I didn’t want to get too close to Peter’s cabin. This early on a Sunday, he and Pat would still be sleeping. “This is it,” I told Aileen.

She got out slowly, and I pointed up to the cab of the excavator. “So. That’s where I sit all day.” I nodded at the sluice. “I dig up dirt from that pit, dump it in the sluice, and the water washes away everything in the basin that’s lighter than gold. Which is everything.”

Aileen went to the edge of the pit and peered up at the machine. “Gold is heavy?” she asked, like she didn’t believe me.

“Heavier than lead. I’ll show you.”

She was still staring down into the pit. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” she said finally. “Something else, I guess.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. A river full of gold. Or a cave with twinkling walls. Stupid of me.”

I shrugged. “Well, now you know.” The field all around us was full of mountain avens gone to seed, waving in the wind. For no good reason they made me think of Angel. “Come on over here.”

In the spring someone had broken into the cabin, and after that Peter moved the safe into the camper. He’d made a point of telling me where he’d moved it, so I’d know he didn’t think it was me who’d broken through that window and banged a dent the size of a fist into the safe. I hadn’t told him that I’d known the code for years and would have taken it all if I’d wanted to.

I led Aileen up into the camper and found the safe in the corner. I entered the code and the door swung open, and I pulled out the Ziploc bag inside.

“That’s it?” Aileen said. “That’s all you’d get in, what, a week?”

“That’s the whole summer,” I said. There were a few good handfuls of flake and pebbles almost as big as the eraser on a pencil. “So, you don’t believe gold’s heavy?”

She frowned. “I didn’t say that.”

I grinned at her. “Hold out your hand.”

She did, her face confused, and I set the bag in her open hand. It dropped right through and she gasped and doubled over, trying to catch it before it thudded to the ground. “My god,” she said.

“Gold’s heavy,” I told her again.

She shook her head. “It looks like nothing,” she said. “Hardly anything at all. How could it weigh that much?” She picked the gold up from the ground with both hands and held it up to her face, turning it back and forth in the light from the window.

When she was finished, I returned the gold to the safe and we walked back to the truck. We stood for a while, leaning against the tailgate, looking out across the big dirt pile and the hole I’d spent the summer making, across the field to the woods in the distance.

“Aileen,” I said.

“Yes.”

“If I had money, enough to take us wherever we wanted to go, would you go with me?”

She turned to look at me. “What are you asking, Jason? I told you I’d stay here with you. Nobody needs to go anywhere.”

“Tell me if you would.”

“Are you thinking of going after Angel? Is that what this is about?”

“I just need to know. Would you go with me if I had enough money to take us anywhere?”

She thought for a minute. And then she said, “Sure I would, Jason. Sure.”

Then we got back into the truck. And I thought about Angie. I thought about why I never asked her before to stay the night or have a baby or anything at all. Come home, Angie, I thought as I turned the key. Come home and take your jeans off. Let me put my fingers in your cunt and say you are the sweetest girl I know.

Angel was waiting when I got home. She told me June was going to take her to the airport the next morning. She had her suitcase by the door. Aileen looked at her and at me and said, “I’ll leave you two alone,” but I told her, “Stay.”

That night, I watched Angel in the bathroom, unbraiding her hair. Washing her face with something from a little blue tub. I knew she wouldn’t like it if she saw me watching there. The light was low and long through the window. Everything was gold in the room. Angie herself had light all over her, the shine of it even in the mirror, where she was looking back at herself, licked in yellow light. And how, I wondered, was a mirror I had broken two days before now on the wall again, fixed and whole?

She surprised me, turning suddenly to leave, and caught me there. “I’m going to bed,” she said.

I knew I’d pretend to be sleeping when she woke and dressed, and only when I heard the door close would I run downstairs to watch her from the window as she crossed the grass to the waiting car, leaving. I would watch her steadily, standing in the door, so she couldn’t leave without me letting her.

At the end of the hall, the door slid open, and Aileen stood there. She looked at me and began to close the door again, but I called her name. “Come out,” I said. “I’ve got another story for you.”

“Not tonight, Jason,” she said, through the crack in the door. “I’m tired tonight.”

My fist made a hole in the wall. “Tonight,” I said. “It’s a story for tonight. You too,” I told Angel.

Angel put her hands over her face and sat down, just there, on the floor in the hall. She put her head against the wall, and her feet reached across to touch the other side without even her legs straightening out. After a moment, Aileen stepped into the hall and pulled the door closed behind her.

My fist didn’t hurt. Not one bit. I liked the hole in the wall
and I would have liked to make another one. I thought and thought about a story. Then I started.

Old Woman bore her two children. The girl had the eyes of a fish, slick and dark and deep. The boy was as pale as a white man. Even though her husband had given her this second child that she did not want, while she slept, Old Woman loved the boy as much as the girl
.

When the girl was twelve years old, she was walking in the snow and saw that it had blood in it. She looked for the source of the blood and then knew that it was her. She lay down in the snow as she was meant to do until her people found her. Girls of that age wore warm clothes all the time, because when the blood came, it might be days until someone found them, and they were not permitted to move until they were found. The first woman blood is dangerous for the woman and for her people. What she does in the first months of bleeding will write the story of her life to come. She must go and live in a brush house outside the camp that her father’s clan builds for her. She must learn to control the power of her bleeding. It might take weeks or years to learn this power. During this time, she must wear a long hood that covers her face and body, reaching out an arm’s length in front of her, so that no one can see her face. She must wear copper and hooves strung around her so that hunters can hear her coming and take another path. If she cuts wood during this time, she will cut her lifeline too short. If she eats fresh meat, it will anger the spirit in the meat. However hungry she is, when food is brought to her, she must throw it on the ground and let other women eat first. When her time of seclusion is over, she returns to her father’s family, but she can never speak to her blood brothers again
.

A husband had been chosen already for Old Woman’s daughter, and a wife for her son. The husband and wife were nearly as old as Old Woman and Old Man, and they had taken the boy and girl to their houses to raise them so that they would grow up right and be a good wife and a good husband. It was almost three days before the girl’s husband-to-be found her. He called her mother to her, and she and other women came to take the girl to her brush house. As they walked there, the girl looked back to see the bloody path of her footprints behind her in the snow
.

The girl was known to be a strange one. Her hands and cheeks were never cold and when she sang it sounded like water running on stone and when she spoke it sounded like grass talking in the wind. Out of the drops of blood she left behind her, small red flowers grew up out of the snow, though it was deep in winter
.

The girl was left at the brush house, hungry, for days. During that time, animals came to visit her; even those that slept in winter woke to make their way to her house. Around the brush house, the snow melted. She ran out of wood and grew cold in her house. Then the trees outside her house said, Cut us down. So she cut the trees and burned them in the fire. When she was outside, the sun shone down and warmed her till she could not bear to wear clothes. Take off your hood, said the sun, and dance as you were made. So she took off her hood and was naked, and danced like that in the forest. She grew hungrier and hungrier. Then the caribou said to her, Eat of me. So she slaughtered him and ate the meat, cooked on the fire. Then she was hungry again. At the river, the ice turned to water, and a fish leapt from the surface and said, I forgive you. Eat my meat. So him, too, she cooked on the fire and ate.
When her mother’s people arrived, she had just finished the fish and its fat was still on her mouth and hands. She lowered her hood so that her face could not be seen
.

What are you eating? asked her mother
.

Nothing, said the girl
.

What are these bones on the floor? asked her mother
.

I don’t know, answered her daughter
.

Then the girl’s brother appeared beside the brush house. I saw her, he said. She chopped down wood for the fire and unfastened her hood and went without clothes. She ate of the caribou and of the fish. I watched her from the forest, and she did not know I was there. I am ashamed to call her sister. I will spit at her when I see her. We must leave her here to die
.

Old Woman cried bitterly because she knew she must leave her daughter. Your husband will not want you now, she said. You will have to stay here alone and raise yourself. It would be better that you had starved, for the shame you have brought to our family
.

Then the women left the girl, and they wept as they walked back, deep into the forest. The brother, who had been scolded for coming to this women’s place, hid in the trees. He saw his sister sit down on the ground, and the snow melted around her. He saw a caribou lick away her tears. He loved her like no other. She was his sister, but they were the children of gods and all other girls were only human girls and he could not love them. Now, he thought, now she is mine alone
.

The brother made a little house in the trees, far enough away that the girl could not see him there, and he watched her every day. When she was old enough, he would make her his bride. But after many weeks, the brother noticed that at night his sister had a visitor. A tall figure would emerge from the
other side of the forest, and knock on her door and she would let him inside. She no longer wore the hood. The fourth time the man visited her, the brother could not stop himself from looking at the man’s face as he left the house. The man was horribly tall and dark, and his face was that of an animal. It was the Bushman, the terrible monster that lived in the woods and ate men and women
.

Sister, cried the boy, beating his hands against the door after he had waited for the Bushman to disappear into the forest. Sister, let me in. It is I, your brother, here to protect you
.