Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) (13 page)

White people love to talk about native elders, but they're
hard to come by. My parents were so screwed up by the schools
where nuns beat them for speaking Mohawk or priests raped
them just because they felt like it. My grandparents are dead
and I don't really know the elders. They probably wouldn't
understand my baby Mohawk anyway.

But I know Phil. He's a smart old guy. He used to have a
job at CN Rail before he worked his way up at the paper mill
and then retired on good money when the mill closed. Now
he writes for the local paper. So I drop by the diner. Shana
brings its coffee on the house.

Phil pushes his paper aside and asks, "What can I do you
for?"

In a low voice, under the grill's sizzle and plates clattering
and chairs bumping, I tell him what's going on.

He pours two creams and two sugars in his coffee and stirs
it around until he finally answers. "She's in a lot of pain."

"Who?" For a second I think he means Shana, whose long
legs just walked by.

"The grandmother."

"The grandmother? Come on, Phil, you going to side with
a white woman instead of me?"

He shakes his head. "Not taking sides. I think she just has
a lot of hurt and she's taking it out on you. Probably ever since
her daughter died. She had Noelle late, a change-of-life baby,
if I remember right."

I stare at him. Who is he, Sigmund friggin' Freud? Who
cares how old she was when she had Noelle? "So what do you
think I should do?"

"Get rid of that hurt. Then she won't hate you so much."

What a wise guy. I feel like hurling my coffee cup at him. I
only put it down gently because it's Shana's place. "Thanks a
lot." I sling a ten on the table.

"You've got to solve this yourself," he calls to my back.

Yeah. I knew that already.

DEATH NOTICE

Saunders, Francine (nee Ferguson). Passed away on November 10, 2009. Survived by her grandsons, Jake and
Thomas Redish. Predeceased by her daughter, Noelle, and
husband, Jacob.

It should be a good Christmas. The best ever, in fact. One of
my buddies gave me a tree, said it was a cast-off because of
the dead needles. Shana rigged it so you can't even see the brown bits. She and Jake are hanging the balls, and Tommy
and I are throwing tinsel at it. Mel Torme's roasting chestnuts
over an open fire, and things would be just perfect except for
a few things.

I was going to take care of Mrs. Saunders. I really was.
I wanted to bash her head in, but in the end I decided Phil
was right. I set up an appointment with one of our mediation
counselors. Mrs. Saunders would never set foot in Akwasasne,
let alone allow an Indian tell her what to do, but all I could
do was try.

Until she upped and died. She seemed okay, or at least
her normal mean self, sending the boys to bed without any
veg stew supper after Jake gave her "too much lip." Then she
made them go to church the next morning with a neighbor.
Said she wasn't feeling good.

They came home to find her dead in her own puke. The
neighbor called 911, but it was too late; they took her to the
emergency room anyway. We asked for no autopsy. Because
she was almost seventy and had a heart condition, the coroner dropped it.

Sometimes I wish he hadn't.

Maybe I'm too suspicious. But I looked up what mushrooms do to you. The real deadly kind. You feel okay for
twelve hours and then you start puking. You end up going
pretty quick.

"Daddy!" Jake hollers, holding up the box of my mom's
old Christmas stuff. "This one stinks! I think it's the candle!"

"Throw it out, then," I suggest. I'm looking at how he and
Shana have their heads close together. Their hair is growing
back, but Shana shaved both their heads after Mrs. Saunders
died.

"I'll just throw out the candle," Shana says, and I smile at her because I still love her and she's such a good mother to
my boys, even though I get goose bumps every time I see her
butch hair.

Tommy tugs my pants. He wants me to kneel down. I do.
He clambers in my arms and I lift him up to hang tinsel on
high. His prickly little hair stands straight up now. He asked
Shana to cut it off when she did his brother's.

I'm the only one who kept a crew cut. I feel really guilty.
I don't know why. But when Tommy hugs me and Shana asks
me to help Jake with the star, I can't help humming along with
old Mel Torme. Shana looks cute with short hair, kind of '80s
punk rock. And Jake trusts me enough to hold him high while
he crowns the tree with a silver and gold star.

Charlotte, North Carolina

saw Jimmy earlier this week. Just before the discovery of
yet another fallen victim to the drowning way. He was
still the same Jimmy, drunk-wasted. Crouched on the
curb across from the market with a half-dozen longtime cronies and their women. Women who have been on the down
edge so long their bodies have masculinized and hunched with
the depression of life lost to drink, hard sex, smoke.

I saw him and I remembered Jolene, her beautiful smiling
face, shining hair. Thought of her unrelinquished love for a
man who'd only one wife in his heart. Thought of this bottle
he'd fully committed to, of his smell, his ways. How she must
have longed for him. Leaving her there the way he did, looking
down on her maybe, thinking he was quite the man for taking
the young passionate breath she'd had, in his making over of
her brown body. Thought of his sudden losses of memory, and
willingness to go on in life so soon and in such close proximity
to her passing, and I wondered if he ever as much as poured a
drink on the ground in her memory, or if he held that drink so
precious to himself even a gulp would be too much to spare.

I saw him and I watched the walkers, those who've taken
to carrying signs and speaking out against the assailants they
believe they'll recognize once they stay the vigil until another
passing. And I remembered how Jolene was always a private
woman and doubted she would show her smiling face in a crowd this immense-especially among the sober living. The
waters may look still today, but each time I glance across the
creek, use my peripheral vision, for a moment her easy presence forms here, waiting. It's here I leave some hope for her, a
few presents now and then, and ask her to go easy on us-the
living. Here, too, I vow to follow him, take him down to the
water one night, bring her Southern Comfort.

Jolene came to mind just this morning, how the light illuminated
the walking bridge rail above her resplendent body. The shining of her deep black hair, under the water, on the morning they
found her two dozen years ago. Right here in the thick of Brooklyn Alley. Just west/northwest from the Double Door Inn and
over from the Broken Bank, Marshall Park. I remember how she
always smiled when asking for "just a few quarters to get by."

It was spring. Jolene, though barely grown, had already
been married and separated twice. She had a young child, but
her parents had taken custody in the recognition of her spirit
gone to drink. She had lived among the other ghosts, friends
still walking the Earth along Independence, panhandling, selling themselves, huddling together for warmth and for desire
of the strange flesh necessary to endure the jaundiced and rotting skin they themselves wore. Those who had lost lives here
already, and yet still breathed, still continued this walk among
the living. The ones whose blood no longer held hemoglobin, red, nor white leukocyte to speak of, yet flowed with a
powerful wine-red fire-rush of alcohol-permeated heat. Those
whose tears bore no salt, yet swelled each time a lost love was
mentioned in conversation. Worse still if one actually passed
by, nonchalant, unknowing, a member of the living world still.
Those who fill the deep underworld here, though the whitecollars cannot see them.

Jolene had found a lover. A great man, great in size and
truly experienced among these parts. His residency here dated
back a good decade or more, since his mom was chain gang
in South Carolina. Heard she died there. I knew him holding
his own guts in his hands. Knew him to be unstoppable. He
walked with a certainty. A macho strut. He was certain-of
himself, of the drink he made vows with. Everybody knew
him. This familiarity, this personal community knowledge,
allowed her protection from the perpetrators who infiltrated
the Brooklyn-side Charlotte streets on weekends, summers,
and holidays. Those who came to prey on the already forgotten but not quite gone. Those who justified rolling drunks as
"teaching them a lesson." Or roughing lobs to "make them
understand." Ethnic cleansers. I despise them.

It was in the month of the eclipsed moon, that time of
reddened sky, after a fresh rain and hail pummeling along the
curb. Jolene and her man. They were along the newly constructed revision bank when the storm broke. They had gone
into the bar to avoid the wetness and to engage some draws
from the deep tap-well, at least until the panhandled earnings
were exhausted.

They say when the lovers went back down the construction path, Jolene was so taken by the deepening colors of the
flora around them, she swelled with passion in the green and
purpled midst and they lay together in the wet grasses along
the bank, experiencing the fullness of newborn spring. They
say she slept there. Fell asleep during, some say. When they
found her she was naked from the waist down, as brown as a
summer doe, lying half-in and half-out of water. The half-in
was the upper part of Jolene. They dragged her out by the bare
heels poking up through the wild violets blooming.