Stolen Life (26 page)

“You stupid brat”—she grabbed me—“don’t you know any better?” And slapped me back and forth. She nearly knocked me out. I fell against her and whispered, “You don’t have to do it so hard!”

Minnie stung me, but she convinced them; she got me out of there and I was more than glad to follow her. And out of Butte altogether.

We were not well prepared—I had less than $90 from my
CEP
cheque—but we knew Mom was back in Winnipeg again. She’d found a job there cutting rags after working at a sawmill in Edson, Alberta, till she came to Montana for Grandpa Louie’s funeral, and Karen and Kathy were with her. I once started Grade Seven—maybe it was Grade Eight—in Winnipeg when Mom
lived there before, so I thought if we headed through Havre and Chinook, going more east, we’d get to Manitoba quicker.

But Minnie said she wanted to go north through Sweetgrass, and I presumed it was to get into Canada as fast as possible. After what she’d done, I had to follow her. But a song by Burton Cummings was blaring on a car radio:

Home. I was “sixteen goin’ on seventeen,” as a real different song has it, and I’d been shipped back and forth across the border so often in six years, where was home? I guess it should be Butte, 410 South Jackson Street, but only Dad was left there—with little Perry for the time being—and trying to live the last year with Dad had been mostly worse than horrible. I couldn’t imagine the last three or four places where Mom had lived, I hadn’t seen them, and if my “home town” cops held me overnight I was as good as dead.

We caught a long night ride north through the Rocky Mountains to Helena, and so we made Great Falls by early morning: very good. The one suitcase we had was too heavy; we were already tired of lugging it. And I was thirsty, Minnie was dry, and she saw a Fast Gas on the Great Falls overpass and she groaned and pouted, “I bailed you out … you’d be hanging off a ceiling pipe by now, c’mon,” till I gave her money. And then she came back with nothing but a twenty-four flat of beer and a bag of chips. For the road, she said. I said, How do you hitchhike with open beer? She told me, Very carefully, so we had the bright idea to toss all except a few select clothes into the ditch. We were teenagers, half wiped-out for sleep, and nothing and nobody but wide-open Montana all around us. The beer made the suitcase a bit heavier than the clothes, but Minnie said she’d soon fix that, and we were headed north again for the Canadian border.

We walked past the highway exit east to Havre, but I asked her again: Shouldn’t we be going that way? No, Minnie wanted
to see her boyfriend first; he lived outside Lethbridge, Alberta, and maybe he’d even drive us to Winnipeg himself, later.

“Anyways, you’re slim and young and pretty,” she said, relaxing. “These cowboys’ll stop quick for you anywhere.”

I sat on the suitcase and laughed at her; she was making herself comfortable in the ditch, wrapped in a blanket a guy gave us outside Helena, opening the next beer. We’d used this tactic earlier, and about sunrise a car had pulled over to pick me up, but when the driver saw I was Native and there was Minnie’s broad shape—“The Human Tank,” they called her in Butte—wrapped in a blanket rising from the ditch to come along too, he just sprayed me with shoulder gravel, his door slamming shut as he took off. We were mad, but we laughed about that, how he looked when he leaned over and pushed the door open, saw us, and just stepped on it, outa there.

I told Minnie, “It was you, a big mistake coming wrapped up in that blanket, you scared him!”

“Ugh, me Big Mistake.” She laughed, pulling a Hollywood. She was about five foot two and maybe two hundred pounds, solid from logging in the mountains every summer. She began to powwow around in circles, “Me plenty big squaw, me happy Big Mistake!”

Overacting so badly I had to laugh too, and join her dancing. We played on the shoulder in the car lights coming down that straight flat stretch outside Helena, heading north for the next long line of hills. “Spinny Minnie” in our family—when we were little she was always Dad’s favourite, his pet; in the White House, when he came home from the mine before he wrecked his back, we girls would jump all over him, but Minnie would grab his lunch box and run. She always hid it in the closet, and he would have to go look for it, pretending he couldn’t find it, but when he found it he always had some goodies, candies or something, in there and he’d give them to her.

The heat burned up from the pavement outside Great Falls, and in full daylight Minnie found too many spiders in the shade of the overpass, so she wasn’t laughing much, even while sipping cool beer. I was very thirsty. I didn’t drink beer, so I said I’d
go to a farmhouse I saw across a big field and get water. They were a nice old couple there; they gave me hot breakfast and a jug of water and biscuits for Minnie. Minnie always travelled easy; she’d drink and fall asleep when we got a ride, so I stood guard—“six-man” as it’s called in prison. I had a ball and chain of Earl’s, the only thing of his I had left, an eight-inch brass chain with a chrome-plated gearshift knob filled with lead, just right to hold in your hand or spin on the chain; the last link was shaped like a claw I could lock around my wrist and no one could get it off me. Minnie was talkative, lots of fun, but I wasn’t. She’d either ride in the middle or alone with the driver up front, but I always rode shotgun or in the back and watched and said nothing. We finally got a lift north of Great Falls in a truck with a guy picking up garbage at the highway rest-stops.

Minnie nudged me, pointed silently. The guy’s fingernails were painted and he was wearing red spike heels. Big brawny guy. I’d never seen anything like it. At the next rest area he got out, heels and all, and hauled out the garbage sacks and I said to Minnie, “Let’s go.” So we left him. The next pick-up Minnie rode up front and I sat low in the open back, leaving the Montana mountains behind in the cool, whistling air, the level prairies stretching east to the round pyramids of the Sweetgrass Hills. The guy dropped us off on the last rise, where we couldn’t be seen by the border guards.

We walked past the U.S. Customs in Sweetgrass into Coutts, Alberta. Minnie did the talking; she told the Canadian guards we were going to Lethbridge just up the highway, and she had a Lethbridge address from when Mom once lived there. All I had for
ID
was my long-expired Grade Seven Butte school pass, which luckily didn’t show how badly I’d done, and they opened our suitcase and relieved us of the unopened cans but left us the empties—nice of them. Then they said, Okay you’re in, but a Customs guard escorted us to the bus depot. We hadn’t counted on that and Minnie had to buy two tickets to Lethbridge with money I gave her, and we checked our suitcase in. The guard finally left and Minnie went back to the agent and got a full ticket refund. She said we’d changed our mind, and
nobody was arguing with her when she glared at them. They even rerouted our suitcase, so our few possessions and all the empty beer cans were on their way to Winnipeg while we snuck out over the next hill on the highway, out of sight from Canada Customs, and stuck out our thumbs again. Spinny Minnie, stupid me.

I was worried. I had gotten away into Canada all right, but I was still under Montana probation, Judge Olsen’s order not to leave Silver Bow County because Frank Shurtliffe was being held for trial in the death of Douglas Barber and they wanted me to testify.

“What’s so hot about Lethbridge anyways?” I asked Minnie again as we walked out of Coutts.

“The Blood Reserve,” she finally told me. “It’s right next door.”

More like fifty miles west as it turned out, but that made more sense than most of what we’d done so far. Mom’s sister, our beautiful aunt Rita, was always bragging she had this great boyfriend Doug on the Blood Reserve, but now Auntie Rita had taken over Minnie’s boyfriend state side, so the Blood Reserve made revenge sense all right.

Late in the day a small man in a huge black Chrysler stopped. I was wiped out, but he was so kind I could relax. I drifted off, so I asked him if I could stretch out on his leather back seat and he said sure, that’s okay.

The song rolling in my head and on his radio

Lying safe in a decent man’s car, travelling, I finally had space for a few tears about what was happening to me. The only other car I had ever relaxed in was Mom’s big blue Caddy,
sweeping down the road, all I could see was sky, feel it soaring through air, the whole family—as it seemed for that moment-happy. If Mom and Dad had stayed together, maybe she would still have had it. A hundred years ago Big Bear’s son, Little Bear, escaped from the Canadian prairies to hide in the mountains of Montana; I was born and raised all over those mountains; now I was running back to hide north of the border. My mother, my sisters, me—running, looking over our shoulders, hiding—Big Bear’s descendants, we had become nomads again; we were hunters hunting whatever we could find to stay ahead of hunger and homelessness. Still running from Whites.

Only Leon was fixed in one place – set in his own violence and almost always in some jail. Never imprisoned, of course, like Big Bear for standing up for his people. The winter before, he’d got out of jail in Duluth, Minnesota—I think Mom even moved down from Winnipeg to live close to him—and he came back to Butte, bringing a girl named Laurie. One night he had me watch while he pulled at her pubic hair; he asked me if I had any hair there yet, and I just left. A little later he got rid of her, and now he was back in jail for running lights through Butte while drunk and then smashing a cop-car hood and windshield with his bare fists. Leon never did anything in his life for anyone but himself; he was too mixed up, or maybe too stupid, to even help himself without damaging himself too.

The Elders say Indians today are masters of change: they have had to be or they’d be wiped out like the Beothuks. Be proud, we have survived! And yet here I was, a century after Big Bear, and I still cried for the freedom he fought for, and lost. Running from one country to the other.

I lay in the back seat of the big black Chrysler and cried for myself, for Big Bear, the suffering and pain of Indian people. Driving west of Lethbridge around the huge fields bending down to the Oldman River of the Blood Reserve, and towards the mountains again. That good man was so concerned about Minnie and me not staying on the road at night that he drove out of his way to take us to Stand Off, the town on the rez. It had only nine or ten houses and a water tower, not anything Minnie
wanted, and he risked ripping out the bottom of his beautiful car, driving right to the door of the house on the hills overlooking town. You could see the long front wall of the Rocky Mountains from there, especially Chief Mountain on the border in Montana, the sacred mountain of the Blood/Blackfoot people.

The standing joke on that rez, the biggest in Canada, was that Blackfoot kill Crees; but Minnie and I survived—more or less. There was no one at the house when we pulled up, but in a minute two carloads of mostly young guys arrived and Minnie just got out and walked up to this huge man and started talking. I felt off-balance even being there, and I must have been a sight, a straight-out-of-Montana mixture of Native and cowboy and hippy, long black-brown hair with no bangs and parted to one side, worn blue jeans bell-bottomed enough to sit on my cowboy boots a size too big curled up at the toe, dark plaid man’s shirt two sizes too big with its tail hanging out, tall, slim, flat, no makeup. But I was strong, well tuned from years of logging, silent and on guard. No one could tell my young age from the way I carried myself. I was always thinking one step ahead of others’ actions so as not to be left behind, always serious, dark, and never started anything, then: I just followed in silence. If I went to the bathroom in a house, I’d feel the air out beforehand and be quick about it; in bars I watched the washroom door to see how many, or who, would be in there when I had to go; before I went I’d always tell Minnie. You have to know what you’re walking into.

There was a long beer strike in Canada that summer; they could only get hard stuff or wine for parties. Everything was happening, night and day, and I drank steadily to keep up. I discovered again what a blackout was—it’d happened to me once before in Butte at the
CEP
party, and losing it like I did then and not knowing anything that happened terrified me—but I hadn’t dared ask anyone about it for fear they’d say I was just crazy, truly nuts. We were at Stand Off for weeks; a young guy named Beno became my boyfriend and initiated my drinking with stories about Bloods who slit the throats of every Cree they meet—it’s hereditary he said—sometimes even with skate-blades! Well, nobody was skating that hot summer. I stuck close to Minnie,
and a couple of times we drove with them south to Montana and came back cross-country with a pick-up full of beer, but other than that it was all whisky and wine. Once Minnie went someplace and Doug wrapped his giant arms around me and tried to haul me into bed while Beno was outside, washing his bush of hair in a rain barrel. I yelled to him, but maybe he didn’t want to hear. As Doug and I wrestled on the bed, we heard a car: it was Minnie, back unexpectedly, and he jumped up and ran out. So nothing happened except Minnie and I made a deal she would not leave me alone again.

I wandered around a few times and got lost, not knowing how to get back to Doug’s house—they told me prairie don’t come natural to Crees—so I stayed put in the little valley among the nine houses and water tower of Stand Off till Beno found me, laughing. He said they should put up a plaque: Yvonne Johnson, the only person in history ever to get lost in Stand Off!

Then suddenly Auntie Rita showed up, and before I could turn around Minnie had moved into my room with me. To “celebrate” the arrival, two carloads of us drove into Lethbridge. In the Bridge Hotel, Rita was all over Doug, Minnie over Beno, and I got disgusted—You guys are all frigging nuts—and I went out to sit in the car. Within a few minutes a stocky Native man came by, wearing a floppy-brimmed cowboy hat, and I asked him if he had a smoke. He said, no but he could get some at the liquor store, we could get them together. I knew Minnie and Rita wouldn’t be out till the hotel closed, so I went with him. He got a twenty-sixer but forgot the smokes, and as we walked back we started to test it and he told stories, sort of flirting. He said he was a real cowboy riding horses on ranches for a living, and he told me of all the crazy fights he’d had and the tough bulls he rode in the rodeo. After a while I couldn’t hear him too well. I just wanted to get back to the car because I never drank on the street—I hate the very idea of a “public drunk.” Then he wanted a cigarette. I wanted one too, badly, so he tried getting some cigarettes off the people walking by.