CHAPTER ELEVEN

On a lake I later called plain old Ghost, we were nearing what Dave had said would be a stretch of Indian land. The wind was at our backs for much of the day, drying our sweat just as soon as it broke through our flesh. Noticed a puddle between my boots, and I called ahead to Dave. He cursed and spat and we paddled to shore, unloaded the boat, flipped it over, and Dave used his staple gun to reseal the scrappy bandage that had rusted loose. Got back on the water, crossed the lake, and there we set up camp.

Dave stood down from me, the water licking his boots. It was cold, but we’d worked up a good heat and he took off the Rotting Christ sweatshirt and his leather jacket too. He had on a plaid lumberjack shirt, red and blue, and under that I saw he was wearing a T-shirt for something called Lupicide. He dragged a thick trunk of dead pine out of the bush surrounding our clearing, and set about axing it up into chunks. From that he built a huge and raging fire. We shared what little food we had left. Weak coffee to drink, and both of us rolled cigarettes and sat by the fire. Turned my back and pulled off the dirty mitts. Unsheathed the hunting knife, and with its tip set about cleaning the dirt from my fingernails and then set about paring them down. New scabs were forming. Focused all hard and I knew after a while that Dave was watching. So I poured a little water there on the fingernails to rinse that flesh and stuff away, and then I put the mitts on again and turned back to the fire and back to Dave.

He gestured for the knife and I passed it over. Sitting on a squat log he’d dragged out of the bushes for firewood but had not used, legs parted, boots stretched out, he hunched over his work, cleaning up his own scrappy fingernails, popping blisters too.

Moon was full and the big black sky was clear and crisp, hanging with stars and galaxies and such. Lake lapped in the distance. Rain came for a minute, but we were too tired to react. Its drips prickled our scalps with cold. Huddled up inside sleeping bags, we drew as near to the fire as we could without setting ourselves alight, and we each stoked it from our own side with the wood Dave had hacked up.

Dave lit a joint and passed it to me.

We sat quiet for a long while. The dismal howl of wolf came from somewhere in the forest behind us, a sound that reminded me and Dave about the longing in our bellies.

Said to Dave, “You ever met someone who didn’t know how old he was?”

“Why does that matter to you?” said Dave.

“In Black Dew Seat there are people who only have a vague idea of when they were born. Don’t care to know is the point, I suppose. Pickles was like that. It’s like he was never even born.”

Along with our own, Dave and me had Pickles’s big old dirty old boots opened up and drying out by the fire. Dave had taken a shining to those boots. Now they were up in the bow with him, stapled into place on the deck so they stood upright and faced frontward and that, of course, meant south. It was like Pickles himself was walking on water, guiding us down south to Central Park where the poor old bastard always wanted to go. Stapled onto the bow deck every morning, and then evenings he pried them off again and brought them over to the fire to warm and dry with our own.

Dave put wood on the fire and stoked it up high.

“Me, I don’t know either,” I said. “My age, I mean. And it’s a real stone in my boot. If I knew that, I think I’d feel different about things.”

“Someone must know when you were born,” Dave said.

“No. Bellyache said no one knows. Not even him.” Paused and I said, “Do you know?”

“Christ, kid. Now how would I know when you were born?” Dave said. Cleared his lungs and then spat into the fire.

“Fuck, Dave. I meant when was your ass born.”

“Don’t know.” Dave shrugged his shoulders. “I was adopted when I was maybe two or three, I guess. Never asked about that and I never got told.”

“So I guess that makes you another Indian who doesn’t know his age.”

“Yeah,” said Dave. “I guess that’s one thing I got in common with Indians.”

Was going to ask Dave if he ever got to have a birthday party, even if it was just on some kind of made-up date. But he’d only say what I already knew, that a dad who wouldn’t let him eat goddamn cookies wouldn’t believe in that kids’ kind of crap.

“But what about your hair? You’ve got that long Indian hair going on.”

“I’ve got thrasher hair going on,” Dave told me. Sounded mad when he said it.

“Or else like that actor, Dave? From that movie?”

“Wig of Blood. Yeah, until the part where he gets scalped.”

“Scalped? Really?”

“Yeah, by these American kids,” Dave said, his eyes taking on a shine. Voice rose in pitch, words came quick. “Then they leave him for dead, see.”

“But he’s Mexican?”

“Right. You should see it, the first one. The sequels aren’t as good.”

“So it’s old?”

“From the ’70s, but my friend taped it off satellite TV so I’ve seen it a million times. Serge Cortez made it.”

“Lots of colour? Big sweaty faces?”

“Sure. Tons of orange and red. Sort of a western, but fucked up and low-budget. Violent.”

“What happens in it?”

“There’s this Mexican, right,” Dave said in a hushed voice, setting me up for something good and exciting. “He wants to go to LA, so he sets out hitchhiking. Crosses the border OK, but out in the desert he gets picked up by a carload of these American boys. Well, things get ugly between them, and they beat him and scalp him and leave him to die by the side of the road. But he doesn’t die. And he wants his hair back, his scalp. The story is him getting revenge on the Americans, tracking them down while they joyride all across the States. Wig of Blood III is even set in New York.”

“And he’s hitchhiking the whole time?”

“Sure. And he hears from people along the way about how those boys have got his scalp all dried out and hanging from the antenna, and he can’t stand the thought of that—drives him mad. And so he becomes Pelado, which I guess in Spanish means Baldy or some such thing. He’s got this big hat on his head and there’s trickles of blood dripping down the whole time and it just makes you shudder to think about what’s under that hat.”

“Sounds good.”

“Watch it and you’ll see Pelado really does look like me.”

“So he’s why you’re going to LA.”

Dave said, “Sure, I want to hitchhike so as to get the experience I need. To be in the next instalment, I mean. But I want to see the States too. So fucked up, especially where it’s hot.”

“Lawless.”

“Especially Texas and California.”

“Not New York, though.”

Dave thought for a second. “Maybe there, too. We’ll see, kid.”

“After we cross the border.”

“Right.”

“When’ll your old man be back?” I asked Dave as he started unrolling his sleeping bag. “Maybe he’ll have more food.”

He looked mad at that, then shrugged. “He’s gone for now.”

“Now we’re two.”

“Something like that. Maybe he didn’t like how you poked him.”

Me, I’d forgotten that stupid lie I’d told, desperado to get a ride in Dave’s shit boat.

Dave went to bed then, telling me to watch the fire. He was starting to feel at ease, him under the canoe and me out in the open, keeping watch over him like a goddamn dog. His guard down. While I kept the fire at a glow and my knife blade sharp, nights I heard him listening to his Walkman under the canoe. My ease, though, was still queasy enough that I thought it ought to keep me from sleep. But our diet of nothing and the constant wear of cold and wet and the portaging and the paddling, the stopping to bail out or patch up the goddamn leaking boat, I fell asleep maybe before Dave did. My fingernails woke me up, though, because they itched and they pulsed and they burned for me to peel them down even further. So I got my knife out and I gave in to them. Cut out the guilt and soon enough the relief set in. And then I put away Pickles’s knife and I got out his boots. Put them on, right over my own, and the night let me fall back to sleep again.

Pickles’s boots over mine calmed me and cured me, sealed up my heart, kept my head afloat. Got me to dream of things I would otherwise only have remembered. Like when I had worn his boots once before. Only Pickles was alive then, and his feet were inside them, those same boots. It was the last night he was with us, me and Bellyache, and someone had sent my uncle Bellyache a letter and after that Black Dew Seat never saw Bellyache again. Even Pickles got pushed away. Kept me, though. Because I had always been there and I could go to town and bring back my food and his booze, our cigarettes. More than anything it was because I was a Bozak, and that made him a real goddamn goat about keeping us together. But I wasn’t a real Bozak, so it went, that not being my dad’s last name. My mom having run away and left us not long after I was born, her brother Bellyache heard about that and came and took me away from the man who would have been my dad. Naming me Bozak denied any other breed or blood I was born of, and so to make a stubborn goddamn point, I wore that name. And after the letter came saying there were only two of us now, his sister—my mom—having gone and died, well, Bellyache got it in his head that everyone not a Bozak would stop at nothing to wipe us out, bury us, shit on us and then on our goddamn graves.

Because his own health was failing, it was less and less that we heard Pickles’s big old feet climbing up the trailer’s front stoop or saw his face peering in the living room window. The last time he came, Pickles brought along a letter for Bellyache. It had been sent to Kate’s Place, addressed to the name my uncle wore in the long ago, before Pickles had thought up Bellyache and Bellyache called him Pickles. Kate passed it on to Pickles when he’d stopped in to pick up an off-licence bottle, and he had tucked that letter away, intending to hand it over after Bellyache was loosened up with a couple of drinks. Bellyache, though, was into a bottle of his own and so was already drunk and bellyaching by the time we heard Pickles knocking at the living room window.

Me, I was sort of a kid still. Before I had met Slava O’Right, by maybe three years or four. Got sent to my room therefore, but Bellyache let me take the TV. Pickles carried it in. The plug was behind the bed so he just plunked the thing down right there, moving my pillow aside to make room for it. Was huge and heavy, and it sunk deep into the thin mattress and spent springs beneath. In my room it was always damp and cold, so I curled up around it for warmth. One foot on top to prop up the broken antennae, I watched so close the screen’s static prickled the little hairs on my face. Liked it that way, face to face with whatever head was talking there, the colours bleeding, going to haze.

Out there was loud with talking. Smoking. Smelled smoke from under the door, and the food Pickles had brought with him—eggs, bacon, and bread—though it would be him who did the eating, Bellyache maybe having some bread. TV was in the bed, I was eating my own supper, Kraft Dinner with the wieners cut up and cooked right in with the noodles so they got coated with sauce. Ketchup and salt and pepper on top, I was spooning it right out of the pot. Sipping the bottled Pepsi Pickles had brought me for a treat. Outside, Friday night was dead with December.

Then the trailer got so quiet I heard it over the TV —like both those men had finally just bitten it, given in, and dropped dead. That or they’d left for Kate’s without saying so and I hadn’t heard the door. Kept the volume up on the TV, and I opened my door and stepped out into the dark hallway. Kraft Dinner pot in hand, I’d say I was just going to the kitchen to wash it out if Bellyache’s racked eyes saw me out of my room.

The smell of eggs and bacon was lesser now, gone cold if not digested. Coming down the hall I hid behind the open bathroom door when I saw my uncle. Sitting at the kitchen table, the lamp above was a spotlight and all around them was black with shadow. Head bent, he was reading a piece of stationery paper, held tight in his chapped hands. Across the table, his profile hidden from me behind his hanging hair, Pickles was watching him, hands spread flat on either side of his eggy dinner plate. Between them was a bottle of brown, two juice glasses, a smoking ashtray.

“My sister died,” he said to Pickles.

Pickles poured his friend a drink, then refilled his own.

Together we waited for Bellyache to tell how it happened, say who wrote that letter.

Pickles finally shook his head and said, “And she must have been such a young woman still.”

“No, a girl. Always will be, dumb as she was.” Bellyache’s chin gave a tremble then. He dragged from his smoke to smooth it.

“You going to tell the kid?” Pickles asked him.

Bellyache shook his head. “And neither are you. No need.”

Pickles looked down at his lanky hands, boned but strong. “You ought to, Belly. Good or bad, she ought to know where she came from.”

“She’s mine to raise. I’ll keep her as she is.”

“Someone in town is going to tell her.”

“Except she don’t talk to anyone, and no one to her. She’s alone like that. Not like my sister was, talking to any bastard who’d listen.”

“And those brothers, what if they get a hold of her?”

Bellyache stood up then, knocking his chair over and hitting his head on the lamp so that for a second or two he wore it like a hat. He balled up the letter, strode over to the door and tossed it out into the night. Slamming it shut again, he paused there, hand on the knob, stink eyes on his only friend, sitting there beneath the swinging lamp.

Pickles got up. With his hand he steadied the light.

That’s when I turned and went back to my room, Kraft Dinner pot in my hand. Heard Pickles’s voice just as I was shutting the door.

“What you’re doing is wrong, Belly.”

It would still be out there, he’d only tossed it, couldn’t have gone far. Slid open the window, stuck my legs through one at a time and lowered myself down to the ground. My boots were in the trailer by the front door, so the snow felt soft and not yet cold through my thick wool socks. No coat either, but I’d be fast—had to be before a wind came and blew away that letter.

Stole around to the front, ducking low so the men inside would not see me. But I could see them, and I heard them worse. Bellyache was shouting now. Crazy, nasty, going on about drunken Indians. Pickles, meanwhile, had moved into the nook we had for a kitchen. He’d cleared the table and was washing up the dishes, cigarette hanging from his mouth, hair tied back in a ponytail so it did not get in the dirt and grease of the water.

Had no light out there but what little came from the half moon above and also the orange shadows that were cast down from the trailer’s few lit windows. One eye on the men inside, one eye on the ground, I scoured the night for that letter, a ball of white dissolving into the piles of snow.

Shrunk up with freezing, arms crossed over my chest to keep the warmth inside me, I covered the trailer’s surrounding property, leaving behind me patterns of small human footprints. Socks wet now, the toes and heels and side arches showed up sharply, frozen in the snow. On the stoop and under it, in front of snow piles and behind them, kicking through snowdrifts, there was no ball of paper for me to rescue. Wanted only to stare for a minute at some stranger’s script, and try to find in it even the smallest hint about what it meant to be me.

All along Bellyache’s voice came wrecking through the night, hurrying me, making my eyes move fast, my feet faster, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. The bush beyond was dark and unforgiving, and so I turned back, thinking maybe I’d missed it when I’d looked around the front stoop. Hopping along on tiptoes now, hot water in my eyes burying my vision, I approached the trailer. Kicking around the snowdrifts on the stoop, through the front door window I saw Bellyache standing above Pickles. Seated at the table, his friend had his coat on and was bent over, lacing up his boots. Bellyache was shouting at him, spit falling from his lips, but Pickles was calm and steady. As if he were blind and deaf or Bellyache was a ghost and only I could see him and hear his wicked voice.

Frustrated by that calm spine, Bellyache grabbed Pickles by the ponytail and started tugging and yanking. Pickles’s head snapped back and his hands shot up, gripped the claws lashing his head around by that rope of hair. Elbows in the air, eyes shut, he got hold of Bellyache’s fingers, fore and middle on the left hand, and he bent them part way back. But the drunken goat my uncle was just wouldn’t let the hair out of his fist. So the fingers were forced to bend even further, and I saw Pickles straining for strength and it came in a burst, and then Bellyache’s face turned into pure howl when his sore, worn-out bones finally broke. On the stoop, out there, I heard that, the pop and crack, and following that was a hollow echo.

Pickles and Bellyache, all they’d had was each other for friends. Drank together, sure, but they also told stories and watched TV, went hunting, fished, had memories of working together in the bush. Named each other too, they made themselves a pair that way. Best friends until Bellyache turned on the one person in the universe who saw some bit of softness in those racked eyes, that black mouth.

It was over then, when those bones snapped. Pickles would come no more.

When the door opened, I stepped back. Pickles stood before me, and me out there on the front stoop, caught in the light spilling out from the trailer. Shivering, wincing from what I’d just seen, Pickles stared at me, my sock feet, and put together what crazy thing I was doing.

Behind him my uncle was slumped up at the table, his back mostly to the door. With his good hand he poured a drink, shot it back, and then he had another, injured hand was squeezed between his knees. Pickles stepped outside, shut the door behind him, no last words exchanged between them.

Grabbing my shoulders, he pulled me toward him. “Stand up,” Pickles whispered. “On my boots.”

All crouched up with shivering, I lifted one club of a foot then another out of the bone-freezing snow so that I was stepping instead on Pickles’s big old boots, my heels to his toes. For balance, my arms went around his waist, my face buried in his shallow stomach and wool coat, and I found myself being hugged by him. Strong and tight, and for the first time in the whole time of me, my life.

“Go back the way you came,” he said. “Don’t let him see you.”

“The letter,” I said, my words muffled up in his coat.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s always been dead to you.”

Pickles squeezed me a little closer. Smoke and eggs, wet wool and dried leather, and I felt his hair on my face. “You’ll be old enough soon and then you can leave here.”

“And I will,” I said. “Maybe even before then.”

“In the meantime, take care of him,” he said. “I can’t anymore.”

So Pickles patted me on the head and I pulled away, stepped back into the snow.

Watched Pickles going, heard the crunch of snow. His big boot prints cutting across my small scurried ones. He went north, cutting along the bush trail that would take him out to Long Dash Road and from there to Black Dew Seat. When I couldn’t stand the cold burning into the bottoms of my feet, I tiptoed down the steps and back around the trailer. TV in my bed shadowing my window blue, I hopped up and crawled inside my bedroom.

All alone with Bellyache now, the last two Bozaks on earth. And I was lonely sure, felt that for real and maybe for the first time. Only it was not for a mom anymore, but for someone else that night I’d lost.