The Rez

The rez is barren. Thule kicks his shoe against the tires of your Jeep and tells you it’ll do. Turtle Island is the place of your ancestors – and also of your guests. Your guests have asked too much, they have moved in, eaten your food, called you names. Strangely, you still want them around you only wish they would give you a turn. On the stretch of highway between Medonto and here you witness the machinery of their dwellings, the ones they built when they moved in. You see them shrunken on their knees throwing black stink onto the ground, spreading it with shovels and sealing the porous, respirating earth body. Her breathing is belaboured, and yours too. You cough and the woman next to you offers you a sugar candy – this confection from the machine that has distilled the corn into a thing your mouth can’t discern except to the throb from the potency of unnatural sugars. /30.

When you lived on the reserve, you hated the boundary of it. The way your non-native classmates never crossed it. The way your teachers, the mail guy – none of them crossed the invisible barrier, just stood gape mouthed outside and watched you, invincible to whatever thing scared them. You never asked about it really, but you resented them for their weakness. When you were eight you went to the woodlot outside Victor Roundsky’s house and climbed on top of the boulder that Abedabun called Big Head – the tallest spot around. And you jumped. You just threw your arms out and jumped. When Abedabun found you, you’d stopped crying, but your face was a fucking mess. You had mud sleeves to your elbows and your little body was shaking.

You twig, she’d said. Because you sprang back to your regular shape. You always did.

At school, Ms. McKay was extra gentle with you, probably she thought you needed to whisper like that when you talk to an Indian. You didn’t need The Gentle. You’d tried things that were hard. You took goos-Ba’s liquor from the cabinet once. You remembered Abedabun saying it’s death water. But invincible people don’t die, so you had a sip and it made your insides squeeze together hotly. You didn’t like it, but you didn’t die. You also didn’t tell Abedabun.

Now, in this city you think about the Res all the time. It’s stuck in your head, you guess. There’s not a way to shake the place you’re from. If you have a kid one day, will they be invincible too? You won’t bet on it. Maybe as they grow up you’ll administer a few tests. What’s important is you can’t shake the place you’re from, and if you ever got with Gloria, you might end up starting a family here – in Toronto.

You didn’t end up at the friendship centre first like Bar told you. You got to Kensington Market, shooting photos all the way from Union Station – not of the grey buildings, but of their wide shadows slicing across things.

Hard not to feel small in a place like Toronto. But also, maybe add invisibility to invincibility. There’s a good and a bad invisibility. When you first met Gloria in the park passing a blunt back and forth with a dude in a blue beanie, you wanted to take her photo more than you wanted to touch her. Fuck, those curves throwing shadows on the grass – just divinity. And after you have her your last cig that time you passed her on your way to the store (you were going to grab a few job applications) she said her name and asked yours and her eyes looked right into you and instead of answering you lifted your camera and captured that look. If you weren’t immortal, you could now die happy.

You tell her a fake name, because you want to be in her life more than you want to honor the place you’re from. You want to hear her slide her tongue over the syllables in your name, and then you never want to hear anybody else say it.

“Manny” is what they put on your grocery store nametag because that’s what you put on your resume, in brackets after your real name. You lifted the resume from Google. They’re joking if they think you need to be experienced just to haul fucking boxes from the store room.

From that time on, you get introduced to Gloria’s crew. They’re good people – messed up, but good. They ask about the Rez maybe once but mostly they’re out here trying to survive. Survival is not a think you worry about. No city will exterminate you. You figure the game is mostly about being comfortable, which is easy to do unless you’re Gloria and you have lots of needs.

There was this time when you had Boon kick you in the shin to prove you were indestructible. The pain was bad, and the bruise lasted half a year – but you didn’t die, you just accepted months of needing to massage around it with your knuckles to get the blood still flowing there.

Comfort looks like sitting in the sun with Gloria on your arm – or shooting a hundred shots of Nancy, your landlord with the gap tooth who say In-jun.

In Toronto, people think you’re Mexican, Tunisian, someone once even said Russian. People are bad at that game. But you can usually tell they’re playing it in their heads, even if they don’t tell you. Boon used to talk a lot about blood. He’s Native on both sides, not like you – you’re half. Which makes you the lowest threshold of a person allowed to have an Indian Card. But fuck Government status. You are what you feel inside.

Anyway, the thing about Saturday night that you can’t stop thinking about a when you first saw a city at all. It was grandmother putting a Tupperware of stew in your hands and pecking you on the forehead. It was the defiant and broken things you felt all at once. It was anger about what a shithole this place was – and that your feuding: listless parents spent their days blowing sound at each other, sat in recliners at opposite ends of the room that kept getting smaller around them. It was your little brother absorbing all this anger, flinching at the sound rolling around in the next room while we did dishes, while he worried about wetting the bed and having to launder it in the dead of night. It was the pain of being born into an adulthood, not equipped at all to handle the anger and the smell of liquor and the heavy snow that kept you inside for days. Once you read a book at school about a caterpillar emerging from a chrysalis and the teacher talked about the safety of the cocoon – the soft tumble of muted sound and light while a young mass of cells becomes a new kind of organism. A shapeshifter. And here you are just pushed out into a world that screams louder than you. Mother calls you Gentle Boy, because you, in comparison are a soother, a hushing wind. Grandma tells you that inside your is the wisdom of the trees, that you all named for them, and that standing straight and tall is your gift. You will live up to your name, even when your parents don’t live up to theirs. When you’re older, but still just growing into your arms and legs, you will understand that the tragedy on the rez is not their fault. That it is an atrocity, a whole generation of people in trauma, a whole generation of people broken, numb, taught to be helpless, to be ashamed, a kind of violence that for your generation is suspended in a tyrannical kind of silence, a game of pretend that makes no action possible because the people in power are comfortable in the same silence that suffocates. Learning this, you began dreaming about dreaming. You can’t just start dreaming. You need to know that as a way to begin with. You need to understand dreams to begin with. And then you must expand them bigger than your body, bigger than the ideas they’ve given you, bigger than the rez. /30

Boon and the others had a hard time with this. They stayed back when you chose to take the plane to Thunder Bay, chose to leave the Rez and your little brother, wide-eyed and never playing, always serious. You were going to take a plane and make a new life, going to change things. Really change things. Because that’s what invincibility lets you do.

Before you see a city at all, you see it on TV. It looks big, but it also looks like the Rez compressed and then stacked on itself. It looks like a place you just need to be in for a while and you’d learn it – like you don’t have to be at Boon’s house to imagine his dad passed out, his mother slicing up meat and thinking about survival. You didn’t have to be at the longhouse to know that smoke rises from the centre, or that Kokum is burning sage for purity, cleaning herself before the setting sun. The rhythms are at least known by you. And here, in this actual city, the beat is so different, the shapes and spaces are so endless, it feels worse. It feels worse that the pieces aren’t identifiable and their relationships to each other aren’t either. And so, at thirteen, you are learning the allure of being numb. You see your friends – they feel abandoned. This school is just another residential school – it’s more of the same, it’s still what kills you, or tries to. Being invincible doesn’t shelter you from the pain of it. Not at all. And after school, in the fucking freezing, fucking dirty, you find Marley crouched, holding a cigarette between blue lips, taking down rum so that he doesn’t need warmth to come from the world. He can make it happen on his own.

Long ago you decided never to drink that fire water, because, although invincible, this family, these people, your people need you. They need to be listened to, to be acknowledged, to erupt from the sound barrier of deafening generational silence. And they will on your watch. They’ll break through.

That’s how you find yourself in this situation. With Marley tearing down the street, headed for the bridge, trying to release himself from this world, this place of attention spans that follow the rich, this place of people who stomp each other out.

It’s done, he says, his face is pink from the cold, and he is shaking as if an electrical current is moving his knees and small body. You reach out a hand and step forward.

Marley, you say. Your tone is dead serious. Marley doesn’t look over. He just stares into the yawning dark, drops the bottle at his feet and peers into the redemptive water below.

There’s nothing here for us, he says. His pink face frowns and releases.

It’s hard to imagine sun and snowmelt and sweetgrass burning when the air and water and desparate body of a friend are in the group of the great shadow of space, the earth leaning away from the sun. It’s hard to prove him wrong.

You want a cig? You ask. You figure that changing the subject is what you can do when you can’t do anything else. No, he says. There’s the howl of car tires somewhere, a patrol car is making the rounds and Winston is scooping Ojibwa youth into the backseat and depositing them in the homes of a host parents who have long since fallen asleep.

Don’t go into Lucy’s room, you remember Martha telling you.

And that’s when Marley jumps.

----

What you feel when his body is lost to the air is terror. Your insides plummet and you are in an instant looking over the ledge where the form of a falling boy, where the shape of the Long Crane, decides this time not to out-stretch wings, but dive, folded into the under place where nutrient-rich ribbons of green flare from the cold bottom and offer respite beneath the ice.

______

The Kingfisher in Goose Bay are no strangers to the ice. They make temporary perches of the glistening barges. They make the sub-arctic look hospitable.

The Ojibway also variously float and camp here, before going inland, to the place where inlets meet. When Boon is born, it is 1999, and the southerners are scared of the new millennium, the plastic-cased computers in the central office sometimes break when the components freeze. This is the clash of colonial ideas, born of a California heat, struggling to operate in a place with ice 10 months of the year.

Michael Bird Song is the first to get a computer, and it makes communication with the bands faster. And when Boon is 12, he’s running the place. He was weaned on this tech. Michael and the others fight loudly about money and how to keep everyone alive, and Boon wonders how silent cranes are so easily able to maintain communities. Maybe their solitude. Maybe because community is about being alone sometimes, because plunging under ice sheets is a way for them to get space and think.

_______

They don’t bury Boon. They burn him. The fire licks up the sides of his body, wrapped so you can’t see his waterlogged skin. They found him nearly immediately once you made the call, and the blue veins on his neck were what you glanced when they pulled him out. And you didn’t go to the McMurtans’ house, and you didn’t go into Lucy’s room, and you didn’t touch the China cabinet. Because those things are off limits, along with believing you have a chance, and believing you are worthy, and believing Boon’s heart could be pumping right now while kingfishers take on the ice water instead. And, in a future which now can’t exist, he writes the programs for the fisheries that learn from those birds. Where he is the one who saves us from melting glaciers and patrol cars and the warmth of something malted that obscures the way you see the sky.