Stolen Life (27 page)

All he got were looks of contempt. Even the passing smokers said they were on their last smokes. But then a guy at a bus stop
shook out a pack and my friend went up to him; he told him No! and turned to the person beside him, “Useless drunk Indians, won’t work enough to get themselves smokes.”

And he lit one, blew the smoke into the cowboy’s face. I could see where it was heading, so I walked away.

“C’mon!” I said to him. “We don’t want nothing from this goof, forget it.”

But he shook me off, “No way, that fucker insulted me,” and he hauled out his pocket knife, opened a blade not two inches long, and I wanted to laugh but it wasn’t funny: he went back and shoved it under the guy’s throat. Whew, I kept walking fast and in a second he had the whole pack. This was too seriously stupid for me. But he ran after me, grabbed me, yelling at me to run, and his unexpected pull rocked me off my feet, I was somehow falling around and as fast as that happened a cop grabbed me. Maybe they saw the whole silly show; needless to say, I missed the ride back to the rez.

They charged me with being an accomplice in an “armed robbery with violence.”

Cops are so slow—writing everything down, they never seem to understand anything. For a long time these Lethbridge police thought I was Minnie and eighteen. True, I was carrying her purse to keep my ball and chain safe, and for a while neither her
ID
which said she was five foot two and her picture which showed she had no neck on very broad shoulders, nor even the extra double-D bra they found in there could convince them I wasn’t her. Who’s this Sharon Johnson, they asked; my sister Minnie, I said. I’m Yvonne Johnson,
this
is my
ID
, I’m sixteen and my mom’s in Winnipeg, but me and Minnie are heading there and if you don’t let me go I’ll miss my ride. You’re not going anywhere now, they said, and what’s your mother’s name?

“Cecilia Johnson … or maybe she uses Bear again.”

“What’s her address in Winnipeg?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“So where’s this big sister, Sharon-Minnie or whatever?”

I told them where I’d left her, but no cop will find Minnie once she knows they’re looking for her. I did persuade them to
let me keep my protection ball and chain. They took me from jail to the juvenile detention centre on the hill overlooking the Oldman River valley and the Lethbridge railroad bridge across it like a long black line pointing straight to hell. When they shoved me into that little room and the door locked behind me with nothing but a small high bed and dresser both bolted to the floor, not even a washbasin, I exploded: I had to get out! and the big window was right there. I jerked a dresser drawer out and ran it against the window to smash it and jump. But I bounced off, the drawer splintered into pieces: unbreakable glass.

The shock jolted me into some sense. I propped the broken drawer back in its place so it looked all right. It was the first time Canadian cops had talked to me, and here I was arrested. I didn’t know how to behave, so I just became as small as possible, go unnoticed. After about a week Aunt Rita showed up and said she would help get me out. But one thing she wanted to know: had Minnie been sleeping with Doug? I said I’d never seen it, ask her. Well, Minnie said she did and Doug said they didn’t, who should she believe? I wouldn’t say, so Auntie Rita disappeared. She helped me with nothing, nor did Minnie.

The judge didn’t take long when my case came up about a week later. The legal-aid lawyer did all my talking. They had contacted Mom and she was sending cash for a one-way bus ticket to Winnipeg. The judge ordered that when the cash arrived I was to be escorted to the station and
put on the bus
. If he ever caught me in Lethbridge again he’d throw the whole charge at me.

They placed me in a regular detention home filled with kids nobody wanted, lots of Natives of course. One was a little girl no older than six who had seen her parents die, a murder-suicide, kept there among all the older ones because no foster home would take her. We became friends; my nickname in there was Bigfoot, and she became my sidekick, Littlefoot. They held a summer carnival in Galt Gardens, and I rode with her on the Ferris wheel and we ate candyfloss.

Littlefoot told me her terrifying dreams, how spirits came into her room every night. I discovered the “spirits” were people
going there, but they wouldn’t let me sleep in her room; I was too old, they said, and stared at me as if I was a pervert when I asked. I noticed plenty, including how the male cook watched us sitting at the tables, eating—it was a very hot summer—at our bare arms and necks and legs. Once he grabbed me in the kitchen; we were wrestling and heading for rape when his girlfriend, a volunteer at the home, walked in and said, “This looks like fun,” and I got away. What could I do, or say? I locked myself in the music room and listened to Nazareth pound out “She’s Just a Broken-Down Angel.”

This “girlfriend” came in almost every day to play with the kids. I thought she looked like one of those worn-out madams from a black-and-white movie. She’d sit flat-assed on the floor with her legs spread open and have the boys shoot marbles between them, and one day it got too much for me. I said to her, “How will these kids ever be normal if you have them shoot marbles up your snatch?”

“That’s the point, darling,” she told me. “They have to learn to deal with it, that’s all. I never lose at marbles either.”

Finally the money arrived and I was escorted out and put on the bus marked WINNIPEG. I arrived there twelve hours late—I got talking with a Native guy on the bus who had a cleft palate too (it’s not as common in men as women), and I missed a connection in Medicine Hat—but Mom and Karen were there to meet me. They worked in a rag-cutting place and lived in North Winnipeg, east of Main, on Selkirk. Skid-row Indian turf.

Mom lived in Winnipeg so she could work, but the only place in Canada really important to her was her ancestral place, the small Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan, where our relations lived. They would never turn us away, always take us in to eat, sleep, get cleaned up, and rest and stay as long as you feel like it, there’s always room. Even hide you among all the bush and valleys if you felt you needed that. There our heritage was dug into the very ground, and there we never felt poor or displaced or useless freaks.

Compared with Butte, Winnipeg was a huge city, with all the extremes of society from the very rich to the poorest possible,
and right at the bottom was a thick layer of Indians. Off Main, in the seventies, you could live for weeks and not see a White except for an owner or a bartender or a cop. If you wanted to go Indian, Canada, and Winnipeg especially, was the place. I had no idea there were so many Indians in the world, whole bars full of nothing but Indians, especially the day the welfare cheques arrived. Karen was living with Gil, Kathy was living with Dan, both Natives, and Minnie was still somewhere in Alberta, and Perry with Dad in Butte. I stayed low, venturing out for no more than chips and gravy. The top song then was “Hot Summer in the City,” and it fit, I guess. I knew how to be quiet, become a shadow, quite still, cross my arms and legs and stare at one spot, shut my body down, but I also learned how to deal with two situations where I was vulnerable. One was when I walked alone: I learned to put on what I thought of as “the Johnson strut,” long, smooth strides, not running but gliding along really fast, I’d be gone before you knew it, a straight-ahead “don’t fuck with me” walk.

The other situation was when I danced. I loved dancing, I’d become one with the music. In Canada women often danced with women, so it was simple to find a partner and I’d just disappear into that endless rhythm and movement. If no one jarred me I could dance all night. There were never any live bands or dance floors in the bars in Butte, but here there were many and they were one big reason I got addicted to skid-row Winnipeg.

We Johnson sisters dancing together would clean up a dance floor: everyone sitting around, watching us. They were used to old, slow waltz-style stuff, but we shook them up with
American Bandstand
style; I personally liked
Soul Train
music. Then, when I turned seventeen, 4 October 1978, Mom decided we’d all go drinking together at the Savoy Hotel. She asked me to do the robot dance; I could do it perfectly—I’d had enough practice all my life!—head and arms and hair dangling slack, moving like a mindless, completely controlled, robot. Mom loved seeing me do that dance, so I danced for my mother. I was wearing all white, and Calvin (or Aaron—he used both names for
welfare or unemployment-insurance scams) was at our table. Mom had once lived with him; he’d left, but now he’d showed up again, a romance for Mom that my presence in her home didn’t fit with very well. While I did the robot dance, Calvin started a bar fight.

Last call had been made as the lights flicked off and on and he wanted to impress Mom, so he yelled out his order with all the rest. I don’t think he’d ever ordered in his life, he was a living mooch, he lived mostly at the Sally Ann, and the waiters thought him a joke and didn’t listen. Calvin had a head like a rock, and when a short waiter passed with an empty tray, to attract his attention he head-butted him and laid him out. When the waiter got up off the floor, he banged Calvin with a butt of his own to the forehead. Calvin scrambled up, grabbed the waiter’s hair with both hands, and smashed him dead centre. So the fight was on, Indians against the world, one entire side of the bar was breaking up. I tried to keep guys off Mom, but she was already fighting. Then the bartender cut the lights. In the dark there was screaming, tables and chairs crashing; when the lights came back on, the waiters and bouncers were yelling at everyone to leave, outa here, it’s over! I was heading for the front door fast when the nasty short waiter shoved the firedoor open and threw me out across the alley against the brick wall. And there were the cops with nightsticks—they called them “Indian licorice sticks”—rushing us.

They slammed me over the trunk of a cop car with my arm twisted behind my back, and then more cars arrived fast as the Indians shot out of the door, and they clubbed them into a heap on the pavement—Winnipeg cops seemed to love caving in Indian heads, and I was just lucky being thrown out first—finally they threw me into the cruiser. Then Mom came out and I watched them beat my mother.

Her knees never buckled. She had two cops literally hanging on her arms, clubbing her with nightsticks. I tried to kick out the window to help her—my sad life with break-proof glass!—I was scared to death for her. They were breaking her arms back, pounding her head. She was clubbed on the forehead, and her
face squashed down onto the trunk, but she twisted around and yelled, “Vonnie! Stay in the car!” when they got her cuffed, but the door was locked, I couldn’t get out anyway, and a special car drove up just for her, and they stuffed a lot of people, most of them bleeding, into the back with me. They pulled us out inside the basement of the Remand Centre on Princess Street, I guess there were too many for the cop-shop cells, and there I saw them hauling Mom handcuffed into an elevator.

She shouted at me, “Just shut up, do as they say,” before the doors slammed on her. They threw me out of the other elevator onto the main floor, the front entrance. There was nothing there but a few chairs and two memorial wreaths leaning against the wall, me in my white outfit covered with mud and blood, my graduation night into the happy, carefree world of skid row.

I was worried. One wreath had a purple sash with golden words: “Winnipeg City Police, the Finest Force,” so I stole that as a token and searched around till I found the receptionist at the front desk. She didn’t know where Mom was, or why I was there. She sent me up in the elevator and it stopped inside a huge steel cage with a cop glaring at me. I asked him about Mom, if she was all right; and maybe she had made a deal with them to leave me alone because he looked royally pissed off at me. My mother was cooling out in the drunk tank and if I didn’t get the hell out I’d be in there with her. So I went home, walking down Main Street alone and embarrassed at my dirty clothing. One thing I knew: my drinking career was launched.

Next day Mom came home all black and blue. By evening the house was full, everyone talking about their war wounds, especially Calvin, who somehow moved in then, and all the White pigs they’d wiped out the night before. I figured with that many of the “Finest Force” lying on the streets, not a cruiser could have moved in Winnipeg all weekend.

An odd knock came at our door in the worst cold of the winter. I answered and saw a gigantic pile of coats, scarves, and jackets, heard a faint voice I recognized. I lifted the hood of a jacket—it was Minnie, her face so frozen she could not speak. I got her inside onto the couch, turned up the heat, and tried to
help her undress: the scarf over her mouth was solid ice, the fringes snapped off when I unwrapped it. She screamed in pain as she started to thaw, but I ran a warm tub and helped her into it. I could hear her soft cries coming through the door. She had been drunk hitchhiking, got raped and left naked, but she got herself dressed again and walked almost thirty miles from Portage la Prairie. She told me the bare details once. She never spoke of it again.

Sometimes I can’t believe what women have to survive.

When I was in Winnipeg a few years before, in Bell School—barely fourteen and not learning much, mostly playing hookey in the washroom—Mom lived with a man called Wes, and they, with Kathy and Perry and me, moved to Leaf Rapids, where Mom was hired to drive a pit truck in the new strip mine. Leaf Rapids, Manitoba: so far north and so new it wasn’t on any map, so cold the snow was hard as the rock for seven months every year. They were bulldozing mines out of the spruce and muskeg and rock, and that’s where I fell in love and lost what I thought I still had, but didn’t.

My virginity. I had lived with certain parts of my consciousness shut down so completely, refusing to remember for so long, that I actually believed then in the deepest awareness of my mind that I had never been penetrated. I had not even masturbated. Mom always told me my crotch was a bad place; when you bathe never, ever, look between your legs or feel there, wash quick and leave it alone. You hide your body from everyone, including yourself. Especially men, and in particular the men in your own family. I knew I had grown hair there, that my body was changing, but for a hundred reasons I avoided it. In Leaf Rapids I fell in love with a Native boy named Nelson and we hiked to a trapper’s cabin we knew. We were alone and I was so happy kissing him, I was completely, romantically in love, and this would be it. O, I was so in love with this marvellous boy, he could dance better than Elvis! And then I scared him witless when I started to scream, “My feet, my feet!”