Crow Jazz Read online

  The first thing I didn’t like about Dr. Catchpole was the way he looked at himself in the mirror he had across from his desk when he was supposed to be talking to me. Not that I said anything much. It made me mad to think he wasn’t listening anyway. I wasn’t going to ever say a word to someone who was so much in love with himself he couldn’t hear the people that paid him money to hear their stories. It wasn’t my money. It was the government’s, but that’s not the point. The point is, he wasn’t doing his job right.

  “I’m gonna burn down your house,” I mumbled one afternoon when it was so hot I couldn’t get my mind off the discount popsicle I was gonna grab on the way home. I had to do business that way because my stepparents never let me have money.

  “What?” he said.

  “Is the furnace on in your house?” I asked. “It’s real hot in here.” Catchpole said he wanted me to be in his club. He’d got all these kids he was supposed to be helping to do work. There were lots of chores to do. Some kids did the weeding and stuff like that. The special ones got to work in the greenhouse where he grew his orchids. I never went in there, and it was a good thing because bad stuff happened to the orchid boys. I heard about it from Tommy. I think he said the orchid boys had to eat dirt.

  I’ve been eating dirt and bologna all my life, so I was real careful. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s slave, especially after the foster home where even babies had to work. I was nice to Dr. Catchpole because of the sports games, and movies and pizzas. I figured if I went along with it, I could have some fun. I wasn’t in it for the uniform like some of the kids. They liked dressing the same, but I didn’t. That didn’t feel right to me. It wouldn’t help me get any closer to being an Indian, which was all I ever wanted.

  One day Dr. Catchpole asked me if I wanted to come over for a barbeque, and I did. I thought about steak frying on the pit all the way over there on the bus, and I thought about roasting marshmallows with the boys, which we did at the last barbeque. We called the black layers of burnt sugar “underwears” and pretended we were taking off girls’ panties. Then we licked our fingers, and they tasted sweet and burnt. Mmhmmm. We talked about girls when Dr. Catchpole wasn’t listening. He didn’t like us to talk dirty, just like the other grown-ups. Dr. Catchpole liked being one of the boys, but when it got right down to it, he was just another cop.

  When I got to his place that day, there were no other boys there. Not one. Just me. He had the barby all fired up, and I could see two beautiful steaks sitting on a big plate. They were thick as my foot, and they covered the whole platter. Boy, you should of heard my stomach growling. All I ever got for breakfast at my new parents’ house was a bowl of yoghurt and a glass of orange juice. Who ever heard of Indians eating yoghurt?

  I said yes to the steak, and Dr. Catchpole wrapped some spuds in tinfoil, and we filled them up with bacon and stuff when they were cooked. After we ate the steak and potatoes and some cut up tomatoes, he asked me if I wanted to see his orchids.

  I should of known there was a catch. He grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. His garden turned red on me. The trees and the flowers were on fire and big petals reached out to swallow me. Even Dr. Catchpole’s eyes turned red, and he looked like the devil. I seen kids come out of that greenhouse. I watched them turn from happy boys into jumpy bone racks. I had to get out of there, but I knew if I ran, Dr. Catchpole would catch me. I was worried he would tie me up in there and let the ants eat me, and that gave me an idea.

  Dr. Catchpole and me used to talk a lot about that guy called Harry Houdini who got himself out of ropes and chains. I told him I was feeling like that, and I didn’t know how to get myself out of that white family and be an Indian. He said I could if I wanted to. It wasn’t hard if you really wanted to. He said he would show me. I could tie him up with ropes, and he would show me how to get free. Even though the garden was on fire and everything was hot to touch, I said I was ready. First, I would tie him up, and he would show me how to free myself. Then he would tie me up. Then we could go to see the orchids, because I wouldn’t be afraid anymore.

  He liked that idea. He said going to the greenhouse was my reward. I tried to stop my hands from shaking. He said it was a breakthrough and I should be real excited. Times like that made him glad to be a shrink, because money wasn’t enough for his kind of work. He sent me to get the rope from the garage where he kept his big van and his sports car. That gave me another idea. I picked up his rope and went back to the garden. Dr. Catchpole was sitting on this garden chair, and he says, “Tie me up, Mouse.”

  I already told him not to call me Mouse.

  I got Dr. Catchpole to hold one end of the rope, and I started circling it round and round him. I kept the rope real tight, just like doing up your shoelaces. I could see he thought he was smarter than me because he was breathing in lots of air and making his muscles big. He was smiling, and I could hear him thinking he was going to bust out in no time flat. Then I would see how easy it was to get out of jail and he would take me to the orchids.

  All the time I was making the rope as tight as I could, I was thinking Mouse, Mouse, and I remembered going to the reserve with the stepmother and hearing the rude things she said about my people. I thought about her correcting me all the time and trying to get me to talk like her people and the little lunches I got at school and the time I got put in the hot bathtub. I saw red. I was a see-red hopping-mad Indian.

  What Dr. Catchpole didn’t know was I was real good at tying knots. My stepfather taught me that stuff. He wasn’t all that bad, not like his wife. Every time I twisted that rope around my shrink, I tied the biggest knot you ever saw. My stepfather said even God couldn’t undo a knot like the ones I made. Dr. Catchpole sure tried. It was great watching his face lose that shit-eating grin when he was thinking about getting out and taking me to the greenhouse where those orchids were gonna eat me alive. He tried and he tried, just like the big bad wolf, but he couldn’t do it.“

  “Mouse,” he said. “You win. Untie me now.” I could hear in his voice that he was scared of me, and it made my heart sing.

  “My name is Clarence,” I said. “Clarence Little Bear Dumont, and I am strong.”

  “Enough’s enough, Clarence,” he tried to sound like a cop, but I could tell he was scared. “Not on your life,” I said, jingling the keys that I took out of his pocket, and I thought about going back to the garage and getting some gas and setting him on fire, but I didn’t.

  I was lucky I didn’t go to jail that time because I got my first taste of the joint a little later on and I didn’t like it one bit. I would’ve spent my whole life in there if I did that. While I was wondering what to do next, I thought about what was gonna happen to me, if I was going to have a sad ending or a happy ending. The whole idea was to have a happy ending. That’s the kind of story I like. I like it when the mouse is smarter than the elephant and everything works out OK.

  So I just left him there. It was good enough for me that I could imagine the fire burning all around him even if he couldn’t. I don’t know how long he had to wait. I hope he peed himself. Maybe one of the boys came and untied him after a while. I kind of hope he was on the ground so that boy got to feel tall the way I was feeling when I drove that red sports car up the Malahat yelling “Goodbye Mouse. Hello Clarence Little Bear Dumont” at the top of my lungs.

  That was the day I got my name back. It still took a while to get to where I am today. I had to start a few real fires and go to the slammer, but soon I ran into Chief Running Wolf and learned from him that helping people was going to be my job, and not just something that happened a few times. Now, thanks to real nice people like him, I have a social work degree, and there are gardens in all the parks where my street friends can grow their own food.

  K’o’yetsin, I’m a bear that fights for my people. Stronger together. I’m grateful to everyone that done me a favour, because they helped me grab my power, even Dr. Catchpole, who’s out of jail now and working at the needle exchange. Sometimes I buy
him a coffee. Someone bad did it to him too. I got to remember that.

  LIPSTICK WINDOW

  We live on number 11, near the Chemainus River, and every fall when the cottonwood leaves change colour, the Zhum swim up for spawning. There’s lots of costume changes going on in that river. The ladies start out in silver dresses that blink like phosphorus on the Salish Sea. My girlfriend says, don’t look, they’re changing underwater, and by the time they get to the logjam, they’re all wearing red.

  That tells the guys they are ready to make holes in the gravel and lay their eggs, gives the signal to cover them up.

  By then, the men are looking ready, with hooked noses and bars that mean they’re going for the forever stretch. I don’t tell my girlfriend that because she wants to get married, and I’m not telling her I already know marriage is just a joint with benefits. I think this hunger she’s got is why she’s been wearing that dress I like. I know she leaves lipstick kisses on the bathroom mirror when she goes out to knit with her friends so I won’t forget her.

  “I’ll be back. I always come back.”

  I call it the lipstick window because I can see the future in it, maybe not what I’d choose if I had my way.

  But she’s got my back. Once she traded a sweater for my Ray-Bans. There isn’t one thing that goes by without me seeing it, not the big smilie who thinks he’s smarter than me, or the tiniest stonefly nymphs. If the fish could talk, they’d say, Weez has X-ray vision.

  There’s a lot of battles in the river too. I’ve never seen a Zhum wearing Ray-Bans, but they watch their backs. When they go at it, the river splashes something fierce. I watch all this and pick my fight, just one every year, one dog that is bigger and meaner than the rest. I watch and wait, and at the end of the day, he takes the hook and does his time in my smoker.

  This magic business happened the year my sister and her baby went to spirit, when I’m chasing after the one called Boss. He was the best; and in the end, I had to let him go, even though I been after him for days and days.

  One night Boss is playing with me, swimming right up and giving me stink eye, then disappearing inside that twist of branches that fell in the river after the big storm last year. He does it so many times it takes all I have to stay still and ignore him. One of us has to wear out first, and it isn’t going to be me. I sit down and almost fall asleep against that big cedar tree with roots that go straight to the river, the best ones for making baskets.

  Crow wakes me up with her storytelling. I always listen to her. She makes more sense than most people. When she takes off, I see her fly around the moon.

  The moon is full, and all the lights are on in the forest beside the river. I hear a sound like wooden bracelets, and then I see a sliver of light between the trees. Since I smoked a joint earlier, I think my eyes are playing tricks on me. The next day, I can’t stop thinking about it, wondering if it could be the wolf that stalked my sister and stole her baby, or maybe my sister’s ghost. She did a stupid thing after her baby went to sleep in the river. She put a .22 right in the middle of her forehead. I’ve got to go after my daughter, she told me before she did it. Nothing I could do.

  The next night, it happens again, and the next. I start sleeping all day so I can stay awake at night. I don’t want to miss her. I know it’s her. I’ve always been waiting for something and right away I know it’s all been practice for getting my sister back. She’ll have a lot to tell us about the other side camp. Maybe she’ll bring her daughter with her.

  The ghost smells like cedar boughs after the rain. I keep hearing those wooden bracelets and the swish of her skirts.

  I know it isn’t the white woman who has her eye on me. She breaks twigs.

  I make a mistake and tell my girlfriend about it. She gets mad and tells me I’m supposed to be thinking about her all the time and not about a dead woman or a woman who watches me fish. Then she goes to stay with her own sister and leaves me to finish the business with mine. No problem. I don’t want to keep on sharing this story with her. I know what I know, and I don’t want to have to explain it to anybody.

  Boss leaves too. He finds his mate, goes for his logjam honeymoon, and then he dies. I feel a shiver up my back. It’s like someone else in my family went to spirit.

  The leaves fall from the tree, and it’s my birthday time. That’s what my name means, Xwixelanexw.

  I stay away from the sweat lodge all winter because I don’t want to run into the crazy river and step on him. I like to swim with fish, but I don’t much like the idea of fish spirits oozing between my toes, especially his.

  It takes such a long time for this winter to be over. I catch lots more fish and smoke them, and every night I go back to the river and wait. My sister was a night person. All night long, she told stories and laughed so hard she shook our bed. I look up at the sky and hear her.

  My sister’s star is a far walk, a galaxy away from mine. But, like I said, I’m a patient man, and Zhum has the longest journey.

  My girlfriend comes back and says she’s sorry and it’s high time she had a ring on her finger, so I take some advice from the guy at the gas station, and I go online and order her a ring for fifty bucks. She gets a piece of paper saying that star has her name on it, but she still wants more, even a real diamond. That’s a joke and a half.

  Did I say my sister’s name is Starlene?

  Starlene keeps slipping through the trees, laughing at me, like we used to play hide-and-seek in the forest. Usually I found her because she was noisy. I even hide in the river because I can hold my breath and stay underwater for a long time.

  This one yellow cedar has a strip of bark missing. It could be rabbit or a deer, or it could be one of the elders making canoe balers. In any case, I keep my eye on her. When the spring rain is done, I peel more bark. It’s like taking off Star’s dress, the one with her blood all over it after she put the bullet in her head. It comes off real easy, and I work fast because I don’t like to be reminded.

  I taste the wood, and it is sweet. Crow makes a sound like water.

  On the night of the full moon, I fall asleep on the ground, and I dream I’m carving. The rest of her dress falls away, and the yellow cedar cuts easy as butter. It sings under my knife, the sound of waves and wind in the cedar boughs. I let it go where it wants. It carves a moon face rising from her shoulders, hummingbirds sipping her milk and Eagle giving her a ride to the other side camp.

  The tree shivers. That wakes me up. There’s wind this night, and the branches shake and moan, and the silver ghost rises out of the tree and up to a glass door in the moon. She goes in backwards, looks back and raises her hands to me.

  When the glass door shuts, she leans into it and kisses it. I see her lipstick in the moonlight. It is bright red. She leaves a lot of kisses. I see her woman shape in the sky.

  I leave the river and go home to my girlfriend. I won’t return until the salmon come back.

  My girlfriend says she’s having a baby and we have to get married right away. I say OK. Maybe it will be a girl. We’ll call her Starlene.

  UTMOST HAPPINESS

  They’re real,” I say.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “That’s a lame argument from a philosopher.”

  “Caroline, you tell me, did I go through twenty-three hours of labour for this?”

  “This what?”

  “Disrespect.”

  “Call it what you like. You chose it. You always get to choose.”

  “Call it what you like,” indeed: djinns, fairies, genies, bad actors paid to make me crazy, or hallucinations, I am not on drugs, and I do see them. Soundless, except maybe the whirring of wings, a pitch that is not normally in my spectrum and could be my imagination; the human-sized creatures turn up at dusk and at dawn, and they seem desperate to tell me something, those frantic damselflies, dragonflies, injured feelings and mutating crows.

  “I should never tell you anything. You always overheat.”

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nbsp; My daughter says she thinks she might have planted the seed long ago, and I’m retro-channeling the hermit or whoever lived in the woods behind her elementary school. When she tentatively mentioned him, as if maybe she shouldn’t have, I worried he might be a pervert, some sanctioned, possibly blessed elderly pedophile gently nudged from active duty, a former teacher or priest from some faraway parish. For sure, he never showed himself when we dropped off and picked up our kid.

  The schoolbus driver, a Cowichan elder well-acquainted with spirits and spirit dancing, knew about him, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing to report,” he said. The same thing the Catholic School Board said about the long-time driver and cultural teacher when a student turned him in for inappropriate touching, which may or may not have happened. He used to pat the kids on the bum before they got off the bus and say their names. “Goodbye Charlie. Goodbye Angela. Goodbye Xwixelanexw.” He knew all their names. I was impressed.

  When it rained in those days, I wondered if the woods and the streets would flood with laterally assigned clergy, blessing the kids with their equivalent of holy water.

  The priest came to visit. He sat in the rocking chair beside our woodstove and gulped the sipping whiskey we’d been saving for something special. And this was special. We hoped it would loosen his lips. But it didn’t.

  Didn’t the school give shelter to motherless kids from the rez? Didn’t the church give the Boat People free tuition? What’s the problem with a hermit minding his own business, contemplating God’s grandeur in the woods?

  I was an expert on perverts who lived in forest shacks. For one, the witch who lured Hansel and Gretel to her candy cottage and fattened them up for the kill. For two, The Ranger who patrolled the forest around the golf-course where I grew up, and on the pretence of looking for lost golf balls, kidnapped and boiled little children alive. For three, all the Highlanders who danced out of the woods where I’d walked to school with their kilts tilting in the wind, offering up the whole menu from appetizer to dessert, a taste of amuse-bouche to the whole banana. Flambé.