Motorcycles & Sweetgrass (40 page)

Virgil watched the man put down the sweetgrass, watched his fingers trace the carvings Virgil had discovered a few days ago in the rock.

“Did you carve those?”

Still lying on his back, the man nodded. “I suppose I did. Are you angry? I mean, it’s your rock and all.”

Virgil shook his head. “No. They’re kind of cool, I guess. Even though…”

“Yes?”

He was quiet for a moment before working up the nerve to speak. “I have a question.”

“Maybe I have an answer.”

“Were you going to take my mother away? Maybe to the land of the dead or something?”

For the first time that afternoon, John gave Virgil a puzzled look. “Now why would I do that? You mean take your mother to the land of the dead? What would be the point of… Are you on drugs or something?”

“Why do people ask me that all the time? The petroglyph. Right there. You’re riding west, toward the setting sun. I heard that’s where the land of the dead is.”

John snickered, and it seemed to cause him some pain. “Yeah, that’s true, but there’s also a cute little motel on the west side of the Reserve, Virgil, called the Setting Sun Motel.”

For a moment, Virgil struggled to deal with the simplicity of John’s statement. Virgil knew the motel, in Roadside. He had been driven by it several times a week ever since he could remember.

“Sometimes, Virgil, a pipe is just a pipe.”

Virgil didn’t get the exact meaning of John’s pipe comment but on some level he understood. Both were quiet for a moment. Then John started laughing, and again it was clearly painful. The more it hurt, the more he seemed to laugh, so his laughter grew. And suddenly, Virgil too started giggling. He was fairly sure the land of the dead was not located in some rundown, cheap motel. The conversations he’d had with his uncle about what the carvings could mean, his own personal fears—it was all too ridiculous. And the stress of the last few days added fuel to the outburst. And so the laughter kept pouring out of them.

Now John was on his back, struggling to take in air, and Virgil was leaning against an oak sapling, using one hand to keep himself upright.

“Oh, that felt good,” said John. “That felt really good. I needed that.”

“Me too,” acknowledged Virgil, and he had. It seemed the weight of the world had been lifted off him, and he felt better than he had in days. Virgil managed to stifle his giggles, then he took a deep breath.

“John, are you really Nanabush?”

“What’s in a name, Virgil? I am who I am. Aren’t you who you are?”

“Maybe, but that’s not an answer.”

“Let me ask you a question first, Virgil. Who is Nanabush, to you? You tell me.”

Virgil mentally went through all the stories his grandmother had told him over the years, and also through what he’d read recently. “He’s a hero, a fool, a teacher, someone silly, someone clever—my grandmother would say he’s us.”

The man on the rock chuckled wearily to himself. “He’s us, huh? I guess that’s as good an explanation as any. I think we’re all Nanabush, Virgil.”

Not that long ago, the boy had wanted this man to disappear from his life, the Reserve, the world. Now he was curious about John’s future. What was this Nanabush fellow going to do next? “What are you going to do now?”

“Me? That’s a good question, a very good question.” Again his fingers traced the markings in the limestone.

“Do you have an answer?”

His fingers stopped. “Hey, want to see something interesting?”

Curious, Virgil nodded, though cautiously.

John climbed off the rock and searched the immediate area. Moments later, he grabbed a thick, stout log, over two metres in length. “Come here, I’m going to need your help.” For a second Virgil didn’t move, until John yelled, “Will you get your ass over here! I can’t do this by myself. You wanted to see this. You wanted answers.”

Strangely, the animosity Virgil had felt toward John just a few hours ago was rapidly evaporating. Virgil ran to him, where he was busy thrusting the log under the big rock.

“Here, hold this.” Handing the end of the log to Virgil, John once more began hunting around.

“What are we doing, exactly?” asked Virgil.

“Ah, found one.”

Virgil saw the man bend over a mid-sized rock that was half embedded in the earth. John started digging around the edges, attempting to free it.

“Um, John…?” It felt odd, talking to the man in such a familiar manner.

Ignoring the boy, John dug his fingers under the rock and heaved with all his might. It took a few seconds of effort but the small boulder eventually came loose, and flipped over. John repeated his efforts and turned it over again, a metre or so closer to the boy.

“What are you
doing?
”

“You’ll see.”

Finally, after much rolling, he managed to get the rock right next to the larger boulder bearing the petroglyphs. John was sweating. He took the log from Virgil and placed the end that was not under the big rock on top of the smaller one.

“Man, this is harder than I thought.”

“It’s a lever of some sort. Why?”

“Help me flip over the boulder and you’ll find out why.”

Together, they heaved and pushed and grunted until finally, after much manoeuvring and repositioning of the fulcrum and lever, they succeeded in flipping the large boulder over onto its side. Though a few hours ago they had been sworn enemies, now they both let out a cheer of success.

“That’s the first thing that’s gone right for me today,” said the man.

Virgil took a long drink from his sizable bottle of water. “So why did we spend all that time and effort to turn this thing over?”

“That is a question I can answer.” Grabbing the bottled water, he began to squirt it at the underside of the mud-encrusted rock, washing away layers of earth.

“Hey, that’s my water!”

“You know, I never thought I’d see the day when Native people would be paying good money for something as available as water. White people I understand. They like to buy and own
everything, but, man, Native people too? That’s when you know something is wrong. Now look. What do you see?”

The water had revealed what lay hidden under the big boulder. “Hey, are those more… petroglyphs?”

“Yep. I thought you might like to see them.”

Virgil took back his bottle and poured the final drops onto the carved images, furiously rubbing away the remaining dirt. “How old are these, do you think?”

Virgil traced the carved indentations with his hand. Already he could make out what seemed to be a moose, a dog, or more likely a wolf. A group of people holding hands in a circle. To the boy, one petroglyph looked like a fire. And some other images he couldn’t make out yet. It was quite a thrill, knowing he was probably the first person in a very long time, maybe since they were carved, to see and touch them.

“Don’t remember. Maybe a couple of hundred years, maybe a thousand. I forget.”

“How did you know they were here?”

“I carved them myself.”

It took a few seconds for the words to register on Virgil, whose attention was focused on the petroglyphs. He dropped the empty water bottle.

“What?”

“That was so long ago, I barely remember carving them. And you have to keep in mind, I’ve carved a lot of petroglyphs in my life, and painted pictographs too. It all depended on how I felt that day.”

“You did this? But you said they were hundreds, maybe a thousand years old!”

“Yeah. So?”

“That would mean…”

“Come on, Virgil, you can make the leap.”

Virgil could not talk.

“Geez, the ice age came and went in less time.”

Finally the boy caught his breath. “Nana…”

“Like I said earlier, what’s in a name? They’re as common as the leaves in a forest. I am who I am. Simple as that.”

“You can’t be!”

“Excuse me? A second ago you were ready to believe. You even asked. But now… So what’s changed?”

Virgil slipped to the other side of the overturned boulder, giving himself space from the man who had just said he was Nanabush. True, Virgil and his uncle had been discussing that possibility. But for him to actually claim it—that was a different matter. A very big and stupendously different matter.

John picked up the discarded bottle, hoping there were some remaining droplets of water, but it was empty.

“You can’t be! There is no such person. I… I was joking. My uncle’s weird and…”

The man shrugged. “Okay. Makes no difference to me.”

“Prove it to me. My grandmother said you could change into animals.”

“Yeah, when I have to. It’s actually really painful. You try not to do it if you can avoid it.” The man winced at the memory.

“I remember my grandmother telling me this story about you coming upon a wigwam in the forest one night where these three beautiful women were sleeping and you changed yourself into a bear and entered…”

John flung the empty bottle at the boulder, sending it bouncing off into the undergrowth. “Fuck I hate that story. Sure, you
boff a couple of women who are asleep when you’re a bear, and over the years the story gets blown completely out of proportion. I’ve done other things too, you know! More productive things.”

Realizing he was alone in the woods with this man and that no one knew he was here, Virgil thought he’d better change the subject quickly.

“What do they mean? The petroglyphs?”

Almost as quickly as it had flared, the man’s temper abated. “Oh, that. Nothing much. I was just bored. When I get bored I petroglyph, if that can be a verb. It’s just something to do when you’re on the road.” John quickly scanned the carved images, as if reading. “Ah, let’s see. Something like, I hunted a moose. Had a party with some friends. Changed into a wolf. And that”—he pointed to a stick figure of a man—“just means ‘I was here.’ That kind of thing.”

“That’s it? That’s all? Nothing mystical or spiritual? Just a diary of some kind?”

“I guess it is. As I said, it gets boring on the road.”

“But there are petroglyphs and pictographs all across the country, all over North America.”

“Yep, I know. I’ve been on the road a long, long time. Places to go, things to see.”

“But they’re all different kinds of symbols and markings. Not like these.”

“Different languages and different dialects. When you’re in Okanagan country, you don’t write and speak Anishnawbe. Don’t they teach you anything in that school you go to? When you decide to go.”

“All those… they’re all nothing but… graffiti? That’s all? Just graffiti? Left by you…”

“Yeah, what did you think they were? I mean, who knew people would think they were important? People crack me up.”

Virgil was quickly becoming disillusioned. “I don’t believe this. This is not what I expected.”

The man shrugged, indicating he didn’t really give a shit. “That’s your choice. But you should realize that if you don’t want to know the answer to a question, you shouldn’t ask it. It’s always amazed me how the simplest concepts are often the hardest for people to follow.”

John stood to his full height, still looking a bit worse for wear from his visit to Otter Lake. “Virgil, I think it’s time for me to go. I’ve exhausted my stay around here. And if I were you I wouldn’t tell your mother that you met me here.” He sighed. “After all this time, I still don’t know how to impress and keep a woman. Isn’t that kind of sad?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Count yourself lucky, young man. Before long, in another year or so, I bet, you too will begin that long road to hell. And heaven.”

Two dragonflies briefly danced in and around the two figures.

“John, why did you come here?”

Virgil was almost sure he saw a flicker of something… something he couldn’t describe… play across John’s eyes.

“Why did I come here? Well, the simplest answer is your grandmother was very special to me, Virgil. More special than you could understand. Simply put, she was the last person to really believe in me, not as a legend but as a real flesh-and-blood person. She saw me, touched me, loved me. You don’t forget a person like that. This is a changing world, Virgil, but your grandmother
didn’t change. Okay, maybe a little, but she was still Lillian. She got new friends but I think I always held a special place in her heart. And me in hers. When she was dying, I couldn’t let her go without saying goodbye. I owed her that. Old friends are the best friends. Always remember that.”

“You said something about a promise to her. What was that?”

“Well, that’s between me and Lillian. Whatever promises you had between you and your grandmother are yours. Of course… I could give you a hint. Interested?”

Virgil nodded eagerly.

“It was a big promise. And part of it involved you. Because she really cared for you. She thought you needed a little magic in your life. Everybody does occasionally.”

John slumped over and Virgil felt a lump in his chest for his grandmother. Both stood quietly in the forest, each remembering the woman who had passed away.

John broke the silence. “Virgil?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want a ride home? It’s a pretty long walk.”

The boy thought for a moment. “I shouldn’t.” Ever since he could remember, he’d been taught not to accept rides from strangers, and there was nobody stranger than the guy standing next to him.

“I gave your mother a couple of rides. She loved it. I don’t think she’d mind. It’s your last chance.”

That was true: both his mother and Dakota had been given rides. Virgil finally nodded. “Yeah, I could handle a ride home. That would be cool.”

John smiled his perfect smile, though one tooth seemed to be loose. “Okay but we will have to take the back roads ’cause I think the cops are looking for me.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. I will drop you off near your house. Your mother and I have already said our goodbyes. Is it a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

The boy and the man shook hands.

“I left my bike by the road down that way. Let’s go.”

Side by side they walked through the woods. And they talked. They talked about life, about being Native, about being young and about being old, about Lillian and about the need to be silly occasionally.