Stolen Life (30 page)

W
ETASKIWIN
, a small city of 10,000 people, fifty kilometres south of Edmonton. Growing in a land of milk and oil. Everywhere you drive in your pick-up—whether on the rolling land to the east dotted with poplar coppice and lakes, or to the west where the roads rise to hills and long ridges to the point where, on a clear day, you can discover the thin jagged line of the Rocky Mountains on the southwestern horizon 150 kilometres away—everywhere the round domes of dairy silos sprout, the waste gas flares burn, the iron donkeys sink and heave to suck up oil. Sometimes, from any rise in the road, you see three or four small churches at once—Baptist, Ukranian Orthodox or Catholic, Lutheran, Roman Catholic—with the unique crosses of their cemeteries spread out beside them. The straight section lines of cultivated land are scrawled over by creeks cutting down to the North Saskatchewan River—Pipestone, Conjuring, Strawberry—or blotted by blue lakes—Wizard, Ma-me-o, Dried Meat, Pigeon, Bittern. And everywhere the rich farmsteads spread beyond their shelter belts with cattle feedlots, ranks of pig and chicken barns, machinery sheds, and grain-storage bins. The soil here, created by ancient forests, by glacial retreat, advance, and then another retreat, is black and deep; able to grow any grain or hay under the long, brilliant, northern summer sun.

Dwayne Joseph Wenger, my workaholic common-law, the best man ever in my life. My grandma Flora once called him “the
White Indian,” and Grandpa John liked him too, they became quiet friends. The first time I saw him, even before I said a word, I noticed a screw in his boot holding the sole in place and I knew he was like me, neither rich nor stuck-up but nevertheless with some decent pride in himself, so I looked away so as not to embarrass him.

Mom was back in Winnipeg, working for Bristol Aerospace, and I was living with Chantal alone in Wetaskiwin. Chantal, my little
raz-ma-taz
baby. When I was free to care for her properly by myself, away from her father’s interference and brutality, she gave me more happiness than I could have imagined.

An ironic name for us Bear-Johnsons,
Wetaskiwin
, “the place of peace … the hills where peace was made.” I found the meaning a few blocks from the apartments where I lived, a granite stone cairn with a marble slab explaining, one word in Cree, one in Blackfoot, and the rest in English:

Perhaps our great-great-grandfather Big Bear helped negotiate that peace between his people and the Blackfoot: he never found any with the Canadian government. The buffalo haven’t existed here for over a hundred years, but it seems that even in the twentieth century my family are still nomadic hunters, in cars now and hunting Indian jobs, searching out relatives or friends who will help them or, as a last resort, hunting White welfare. And still trying to avoid the White law that rules everywhere, avoid its jails with their doors open like traps, waiting to slam shut on us.

Mom’s oldest sister Josephine lived in Wetaskiwin then, moving between her apartment in town and the Hobbema reserves south of town. The four Hobbema Cree Nations—whose total population is almost equal to that of Wetaskiwin itself—are
the resource-wealthiest reserves in Canada; their oil royalties are so big that for a while, when a young person turned eighteen, they were given anywhere from eighteen to seventy thousand dollars in one lump. Often they headed straight for Auto Row in Wetaskiwin, where smooth car salesmen were waiting to sell them the biggest vehicle they could. At times they took up apartments in Wetaskiwin, and lived by moving back and forth between city and reserve; then the tensions between Natives and Whites often ran very high. The easy-going, partying life-style—some called it lawless living—of the Cree often bumped into the White members of the more than twenty churches and missions, many with strong fundamentalist Christian beliefs, who were the middle-class property and business owners of the city. After some years this lump payment was stopped: the social problems on the reserves became almost overwhelming, with accidental and suicide death rates among young people six times the national average.

Auntie Josephine had been moving back and forth between Wetaskiwin and the four reserves at Hobbema for a few years, and when I came into town I found a place in the Heritage Apartments, where one of Mom’s brothers and his common-law lived on the first floor, and her youngest sister Aunt Rita lived with Albert Yellowbird on the third. Rita was still very pretty, but not what she was when she lived with us in Butte—she told Mom she thought some jealous woman was doing Indian medicine on her to make her ugly quicker—but I thought it was more likely age and hard living. Minnie arrived soon after me, and through her I met a White man named Dale; I went to bed with him once and he moved right in on me, sponging off me. I didn’t know how to tell him to get lost.

I didn’t know how to lock the door on anyone; family was always bothering me. Soon it was Perry, which was not too bad, but then my cousin Shirley Anne—Aunt Josephine’s daughter; we hadn’t met for a long time—who was between shack-ups and had insurance money to blow, passed her two teenage girls off on me while she went to party until the money was gone. That was typical for her. I got along well enough with her girls then,
especially the youngest, who liked school at that time. I stayed home, until one cold late January night I thought, what the hell, I’m going out—maybe then I’ll get enough guts to kick Dale out.

I took Chantal to a woman friend in the next apartment and called a cab. The cab driver who answered had given me a ride once before: it was Lyle Schmidt. He looked at me hard when I got into the front seat—I never did that in his cab again—and for all my street living I didn’t recognize what the look meant, but I remembered later.

“You want to go for a drink somewhere? All alone?” And he laughed, as phoney a laugh as I’ve ever heard. “There’s only two bars in this fucken town!” And he drove me to the farthest one. The Wayside Inn south on the highway, all of six minutes away. His radio was on loud, with Doc Hook singing “Penicillin Penny”:

I had a beer alone in the Wayside, relaxing, watching a video on the big bar screen. Then I noticed a man standing by my table. “Mind if I sit down?” he asked.

Dwayne Wenger. Long hair, stocky, a bit shorter than me, nice flared nose in a quiet face. His baggy jeans were his “uptown” clothes, but even they were speckled by the thousands of paint cans he must have opened—looking seventies hippy, like I remembered them—with muscular arms from all his painting, his shoulders squared back and eyes friendly, not cocky and condescending like most White guys on a pick-up. I thought, this one won’t be hard to handle if he gets out of line.

So he sat down and offered to buy me a drink, but I said, “No thanks.” I thought, I buy my own beer and owe him nothing. He sipped water at first—he said, “I want to sober up and not miss you!”—but after a bit he ordered beer too. I didn’t know then that
he couldn’t stop himself drinking, that he sipped whisky steadily all day long while he worked. He wore work boots crazy with paint, and that screw held the rim of one sole together, and we talked. He liked nature, he’d gone to California after he finished high school to study to become a herbalist and he seemed so natural, genuinely happy-go-lucky and not at all snooty, like so many Whites in Wetaskiwin I despised, who hated the oil-rich Hobbema Cree, and sneered and treated them like dirt even while they exploited them for their businesses. Talking to me, Dwa seemed so straightforward and strangely innocent; not tricky or game-playing.

After a time I talked too. The
P.A
. was playing like crazy, and here was a stranger who didn’t push me, he listened. And I told him about the mountains in Montana where I was born and grew up. Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth as they called it, a mile high and a mile deep, really the asshole of the world, the stomping ground of the one and only Evel Knievel, who did show-off motorcycle wheelies in every parade and whom I detested, and how our house sat on the rim of the giant open-pit mine before it swallowed our lot and the house vanished, and how our family cut poles in the high timber when my brother Earl was still alive and I was little, I ran like a whisper under the branches of the pines. I could be so quiet: once I came up on a cougar stretched on a rock just below me, very close. I could have reached out and touched its bright skin, the muscles flexing under it like water. The cougar was watching my family work, and I did too—my mom and Leon and sisters piling brush, my dad and Earl placing the posts one by one onto our flat-deck truck. I told Dwayne Wenger all those things no one ever listened to, and I never could speak to anyone anyway, I was silent, especially with White men, but somehow this stranger invited words, so easy, and I felt natural, open, letting them run out. He sipped beer and listened.

I even told him how hard it was to deal with my life, that I couldn’t stand up to anyone, including Dale, whom I didn’t even like but who wouldn’t get out of my apartment, who thought we were shacked up. How I hated myself for not being able to get rid
of him, teetering on a tightrope and this was my night out as protest. And then Dwayne got up and walked away, into the Men’s, and alone suddenly I felt ridiculous talking and talking like that.

In fact, I knew I was lucky he left when he did. I had been hinting enough, maybe I’d been about to blurt out how often I thought of killing myself.

When Dwayne came out, he stopped by another table. He bent over one of the men there and laughed, and the man looked around at me, smiled and laughed too. But then he came back, and sat down beside me again. His painty boot. He looked at me till I looked up.

“I was telling my buddy over there,” he said. “You’re the woman I’m going to marry.” And then, when I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know where to look, he said to my bent head, “Do you like to dance?”

They were playing “Jump” by Van Halen and we were dancing on the Wayside parquet dancing floor. How I love to dance. He wasn’t shy; he liked to dance too, so light on his feet. Perry and Dale came into the bar and I told him, “The slim one’s my little brother, the other the guy I was telling you about.” After our dance we sat with them. Dwayne bought everyone a beer, then Dale ordered a complete tray and drank it all down, one after another, not even coming up for air. Dwayne sat across from me and we continued to talk. He understood what I thought of Dale and he passed me his phone number. Dwayne told me about the nice houses he painted, even the cells of the Wetaskiwin jail; he was inside everything with his brush and roller and drippy cans. But then Dale began to loll and sag and they were going to throw him out; it was really cold that night, so we hauled him out instead and headed for Heritage Apartments. We were in Dwayne’s painting van, a big, boxy 1961 Chevy, pretty cold, and the three of us sat up front while Dwayne drove and Dale rolled around, stretched out among the paint cans in the back.