CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Ottawa River was south-flowing. Dave said it was one of only two rivers in the whole of Ontario to do so. We rode its waters at a swift pace, and when our bodies begged us to stop, we took in our paddles, letting the river glide us along. We saw ghosts flicker through the bush on the east side of the river, and Dave said it was traffic when I called up to him about it and about the skidding whir that ripped through that otherwise silent night. A stretch of highway had nudged up real close to the river, and we were breaking south quickly. This here was Planet Earth now and Black Dew Seat was long gone. But then that meant too that Slava O’Right and that big old X on the map were coming near. Tasted iron in my mouth. This was coming up to be his country and things were maybe coming to a close. That stuff with Slava was going to get scratched out for good. Dave’s deal was tooth for tooth, and mine was eye for eye, but with Slava, he’d have to give me both of his green marbles, one for me and one for Pickles. Pictured it like that: a finger in the right, hunting knife in the left. But then maybe that wasn’t equal because though what he did to Pickles was with his drunk and clouded eyes, to me he’d done injury with the foul mind and dirty blood that stirred and stiffened his O’Right prick.

Sun broke open in the east. Dave fished out a good-sized pike that I unhooked and killed, smashing the head against a rock, blood splattering our boots and pant legs. Dave stood above, watching me clean the fish. Saw him see the muscled hands I had, the chapped knuckles, the blackened scabs where the nails should have been. Gorged ourselves on fish and drank coffee. Had a smoke, went off into the bush to sleep and did so until the day was mostly done, waking to the spill of setting sun. The sky opened up and squeezed out a short spring shower. Dave and me pushed on as the rain fell warm on our faces.

On and getting closer to Slava all the while, following the point of Pickles’s boots, looking for signs of Dave’s dad. Rifted through the night thick with the shadowed trees lining either side of the river and hemming us in. Then we saw a patch of flames break through the shadows of the river’s west bank. Got our backs up and slowed the canoe, skirting uneasily along the riverbank. We heard voices and the steady thump of music. Paddled closer. That light, it grew brighter: firelight and car light. Closer still and we saw human shadows moving, heard voices going rapid, heard laughter and shouts. Heard the bump and grind of store-bought music. Dave and me, we followed that sound and we sidled up to the bank and pulled on low-hanging branches to keep the canoe steady and still.

“A party,” Dave said.

“Yeah, a fucking bush bash.”

We eased our way downriver and soon were close enough to smell bonfire. Heard the smash of glass, a dipshit laughed, then someone turned up the stereo because “Back in Black” came on.

“Girls,” Dave said. “Drunken small-town party girls.”

“What a bunch of losers. Cock-rock hockey jocks I bet is what they are, the fuckers.” Spat at that, in the direction of the voices, the fire, the headlights, that stupid song.

“Let’s paddle by and see what’s happening. Maybe I can score some pot, acid hits. You done acid before, kid? We ought to out here, it’d be a blast. Plus, fuck, we’re on acid we could go on, not sleeping, make New York in, like, two, three days.”

“Sure, and it’ll make us way worse for being paranoid.”

Told Dave those kids up there were likely assholes, and even if they weren’t, I didn’t want to go find out otherwise. “I ain’t out here to fuck around with small-town losers like that, Dave. Neither are you.”

“OK,” Dave said. “I’ll go check it out. See if I can score. You stay and wait.”

Three pickups and a car were parked side by side, looking out at the river’s edge. Glaring headlights picked out our profiles as we drifted past.

A voice came calling, rolling on down the bank. A girl’s voice, it was, saying for everyone to look ’cause there’s people down there on the river.

Shadows emerged, came down toward us. A shadow slipped, fell. Laughter. Dave was breaking with his paddle, and I was being real stubborn, trying to paddle past.

“Dave, let’s go,” I said. “We don’t want to mess with those dicks. I hate drunk girls like that.”

“Well, fuck, I don’t,” Dave said. “Drunk girls are the very best kind.”

Turned my head and I spat. “You’re a horn-dog is what.”

“So what? And fuck you, you righteous bitch.”

We heard someone call out to come up for a beer.

Lanky shadows posed on the river’s edge with glowing smokes, beer bottles in their hands, hips jutting out to the side.

“You have beer?” Dave called out.

“Dave, you sack of shit,” I said. Then, “Dave, please, let’s not.”

“Just one beer.”

“No,” I said. “I fucking refuse to hang out with those sluts.” Dug my paddle into the water to prove it, and Dave used his own to brake the canoe against the shore.

“That’s fine, kid, Stay down here and be the miserable punk you are.”

Dave pulled up his hood, but kept his jacket open so that all the world would be sure to see it said Rotting Christ. Climbed onto the bank, tied the bowline around the base of a tree.

Dave’s figure melted in with those on the shore. They all went up and disappeared into that glow of bush bash.

Waited then, all pissed off. Drunk laughing from above, party tunes that were always the same. Well, I felt right mocked and I started to think maybe I should just say fuck it, loosen up, and go have a can of warm beer. Thought too I ought to go and make sure Dave didn’t go and get all drunk or, worse, get into a fight. Maybe I could pick a drunk pocket or at least score free beer, smokes, some chips to eat.

Found a cloth on the floor of the canoe and dipped it in the river and used this to wipe down my face. Also took off jacket and sweater, changed my filthy homemade Perps tee for the store-bought Bob Crater and the Goddamns one. Tight it was, nice and faded, and for once I liked the way it made me look. Leather jacket went back on, tightened the belt up to one of the new holes I had made, the third one since I’d left Black Dew Seat. Smoothed down bangs so they covered my eyes and then took a minute to sharpen the hunting knife, just in case there would be trouble. Put the old mitts back on too, because the fingernails on me were really awful to have to look at. Then got out of the boat and pulled it up onto the riverbank, pushed it off into some bushes. Gave Pickles’s boots a friendly old rub and climbed the bank, slippery and wet from recent rain.

Into light. The dirt of smoke, dirty music, and dirty girls, the ugly dirt of the cock-rock hockey jocks that I knew would be in charge of what I hoped would not dissolve into a big old BDS-style bush-bashing.

Took a beer from an open case, then moved in toward the bonfire, high and hot enough Dave Bashed-up-Boat could have been the one who built it. Kids there were feeding it wet leaves, cardboard beer cases, empty cigarette packs, maps and magazines, somebody’s running shoes. Swigged at the beer, narrowed my eyes, searching for Dave and his dark shadow. These kids, sucking on cigarettes, on bottles, on each other’s faces. There must have been a good size town nearby. Walked around the bonfire. Helped myself to another beer. Eyes were on me, making me paranoid. No allies there, just rocker goddamn jocks the same as in Black Dew Seat. Saw it all, recognized it for what it was, and though it hurt my eyes and made me hate, I’d not turn away from it until I had Dave with me again.

“Get outta my dreams. Get into my car.” Someone really said that, just next to where I was standing. “Or at least come see it. It’s parked just over there.”

A boy in tight jeans and one of those down-filled vests. He smiled at me and showed me his hockey teeth.

“Forget the car,” I said. “I’m looking for Dave.”

“Dave? You want Cobb, Proctor, or Lafleur?”

“I mean Dave. Tall, Indian, Rotting Christ sweatshirt, leather jacket. I really gotta find him and go.”

“Don’t know about that Dave. But, hey, you need a ride, ’cause, like I said, I got a car tonight.”

Under this boy’s eye it was all yellow and brown, the leftovers of a bad bruise. He looked to me like a scrapper.

“You’re fucking wasted.” He had put the wrong end of a cigarette in his mouth and tried to light the filter. “It’s backwards, fuck-o.”

He laughed, threw it away. Asked me if I had a cigarette he could maybe bum.

“You mean literally? Is that what you think cigarettes are for, up here in butt-fuck nowhere?”

Kept right on smiling. Not too sharp, I saw. Could say anything to this one, call his mother a fucker and sucker of pink dog dicks and he’d still want to show me his car.

Leaning back with his beer and his belly thrust forward. “You gotta see this car.”

“Yeah, why’s that? Why do I have to see this car?”

“Brand new Hidatsa, man, just off the line. But I got to take it back tomorrow. I got it, right, from the neighbours, me and Al did. They’re down in Florida, won’t be back until tomorrow or something. Al had to go there, right, to feed their cat and they had this sweet set of wheels in the garage there, so we took it, borrowed it. No one’ll know.”

“You’re bad-ass, you and this Al fucker.”

Looked hard at me. “You’re not from here.”

“How’d you guess that, I wonder?”

“Well, first is you swear more than I ever heard from a girl before, and second is that you look kinda different, like your hair.”

That boy paused, swallowed the rest of his beer and tossed the bottle into the bushes. “Third is that I never seen you around and I lived here my whole life.”

“Well,” I said. “You are a clever fucker. Now why don’t you show me that car you’re all on about.”

“You’re on. Sure Dave won’t mind?”

“Dave won’t mind if you show me a car, ’cause that’s all you’re gonna do, pal.”

“Right. OK. He your boyfriend though?”

“My sidekick is all. And I’m his.”

“Good, ’cause tonight I ain’t looking for a fight with no fucking Indian.”

He smiled his hockey smile, and said he hadn’t gotten my name.

“Because you didn’t ask and I didn’t give it.”

“Well, I’m Dwayne. But you can call me Wank.”

“Bozak,” I said.

Don’t know why I said for him to show me that car, except that I was feeling hostility from the kids there, me being a stranger and standing there all alone, and I guess I thought this Wank could help me out, make me blend in just a bit better. Followed him, eye on the wallet bulging out the back pocket of his blue jeans.

And really, I had never seen a car like that before, like the Hidatsa. Shiny blue, and clean inside and out, round edges, headlights working, all four of them, a car meant for family drives on paved roads, bringing home groceries, picking up kids. It impressed me, but I didn’t say as such. Wank had lots of beer, a cooler full in the truck. Gave one to me, said there was a bottle of Wild Turkey that Al had someplace. Asked for a belt of that whisky to wash down the skanky flavour of the Blue, but Wank couldn’t find it.

Were standing away from the party, being the last car there in that row, and as such we were practically in the bushes. Kept my hand on the knife the whole time. Wank put a tape on the car stereo and when I heard Neil Young singing, I shouted for him to turn it off, saying I was allergic to that whiny goddamn bastard. Wank said OK. Turned around and turned it off.

“You’d rather just talk.”

“No, I’d rather just sit here and drink my beer.”

Smoked Wank’s Player’s Lights when he found them. Told him I wanted to know how come hockey players are the only athletes on the planet who smoke. Wank shrugged, saying it was maybe just they were more hardcore than most, maybe because the cold air and all that ice makes your lungs work better, your breathing stronger, faster. He asked how it was I knew he played hockey. Said to him how could I not know, it’s written all over your beat-up face. Wank smiled.

“I’ll bet you’re defence.”

The guy blushed. He asked how I knew that, thought someone had told me.

“It’s just the way you act, see.”

Wank, he smiled at that. He held up his beer to me, said he liked me, that I was right on. Liked girls who could talk hockey, “not like most of the sluts around here.”

“Well that’s great of you to say,” I said to old Wank.

Then I thanked him for the beer, said that I ought now to go look for Dave. Wank said he’d come along. Locked the car, checked all the doors, saying he was paranoid on account of how it wasn’t his. Put the keys in the pocket of his jeans. The key ring had hanging off it a round red apple, and it bulged in Wank’s front pocket, near enough to his own bulge of groin that they looked part of the same package. Then he remembered he wanted more beer, so he fumbled around with the keys again, opening up the trunk.

“Fuck,” he said, “I’m just gonna take it all. Gonna get shitfaced, me and Al. Hey, where is Al anyway?”

“You bastards driving this precious goddamn car home tonight all loaded?”

“Bunch of us got tents just over in the trees there. We’re gonna camp.”

Helped Wank with carrying the beer cooler, me teasing Wank and Wank not noticing, and I came to think he was probably OK for that kind of guy.

Back at the fire, through the yellow headlights of the pickups, I saw Dave right away, and Wank, he saw Al. A big crowd had gathered and that made it hard to make out what was going on. But the smell of fighting was in the air, sure as the smell of beer and burning leaves.

Dropped my end of the cooler at the same moment Wank dropped his. Dave was facing off against a kid who looked and dressed the same as Wank except twice as big. Plus his jeans were way tighter, enough to see his horse-sized balls. Thought for sure Dave had an advantage there, jeans like that being really hard to fight in.

The music stopped. Al was saying to everyone how this fucking Indian took his ex-girlfriend into the woods and fucked her.

“And now I’m gonna fuck you up, asshole.”

“That chick fucked me, if you wanna know it.”

Dave looked drunk, could see that right away. But something else too. His eyes had turned flat black. They were stone and cold. He dropped, I thought, remembering his talk before about wanting to get some acid. He’ll either gouge that guy’s eyes out or get his ass kicked, karate kid or not. All that bantering went on, back and forth, who fucked who, who the fuck cares, she’s not even your girlfriend, who the fuck asked you, who the fuck do you think you are. Then someone got sick of it and dodged out of that crowd, pushed Dave from behind hard so he went flying on into Al. Hit him square on the chest, his head not even reaching Al’s chin. Half the crowd lurched forward, the other half stood back. Me, I went on up close in case Dave might come to need me.

Right off it was pretty clear that Al’s eyes were coming out. Dave fought hard and rough and he was fast besides, quick in a way that hockey jocks, weighed down with all that equipment, really know nothing about. Watched Dave dish it out and I remembered the tooth in his pocket, and I thought how having a tooth you broke out of your dad’s mouth was like cutting off your own dad’s dick. These small-town kids, they were going for Al, shouting for Al, telling Al to kill that fucking Indian, stomp his ass, scalp his head. Al was all bloody in the face from Dave’s high kicks and after a while he went right on down and then Dave’s karate kicks turned into plain old Black Dew Seat–style ones, like the brutal barroom, backroom, backwoods kind, and he just fucked all his training. Dave got down and was punching Al’s face, and it made him vulnerable. Thuds of fist to face. All those kids saw Al was getting pulpy, eyes swelling shut. They turned into a swarm, and Dave disappeared beneath a pile of drunk and drugged boys. Wank was in there too, climbing his way up the snaking and swearing pile. Couldn’t even see Dave anymore, lost, tangled up as he was, but I heard his body give out and out, again and again, under that soft crush of running-shoe kicks. That was a sound I knew well.

Pulled Pickles’s knife and stabbed the blade deep and hard into the first body part I came to. A leg. A jean. A scream. Gave the knife a twist, pulled it out and poked it in again, into another leg, and then into an ass. And then all those boys got off Dave and they got on me, laid me out in the dirt, and it was my body being ripped and torn and kicked at. Held tight to the knife. Thought, just as soon as I can see something, just as soon as this blood is gone from my eyes, I’m gonna stab a heart out of one of these boys. That made me calm, patient. And then the beating stopped and the pain began. A hand pulled me up to my feet, and I felt arms around me and I knew without seeing that it was Dave. Staggered off into the dark, Dave and me.

“The Goddamns?! Goddamn fucking dirty dyke bitch. Goddamn crazy Indian.”

Shouts followed us as we slip-slod back down to the boat. Dave helped me just as much as he could, but we slipped in the dew on the grass and fell hard, way down that sloping riverbank. Laughed a bit at that, us falling like that. Dave, spitting and swearing. Lay for a minute, wet in the dew, then got up and together we found the boat.

We washed our faces in the water. Dave got a towel from his duffel, tore it in half, and gave me one part of it. Wet it, held it to the face, lips, bleeding eyes. Told Dave I thought I might die, I felt so sore and bad. Above us, the music was back on and car horns were honking, headlights flashing, mocking Dave and me and driving us away. Paddled far enough along so that we could not hear music, and then we stopped, pulled over. Beached the boat and crawled to shore and lay on our backs, wriggling and breathing hard. The bugs came to eat us alive, digging into the blood on our faces, getting stuck there. Got out the Muskol and sprayed it around, and it got in the open sores we had, the messed-up mouths and eyes, and it stung sure-as-shit.

Those guys had used on him a broken bottle. Me, I pulled the hip flask from his pocket. Opened it and took a generous swallow. Passed it back to Dave and he used it to douse a corner of the rag. Said how he would have only one eye now if they’d got him just an inch higher. Held the towel tight to stop up the bleeding, though every time he pulled it away, more came crawling down.

“Fuck,” Dave said. “It’s been a while since I had the shit kicked out of me like that.”

“Me too,” I said. “This fucking sucks.” Spat blood into the water. Heard him there, but I couldn’t really see him through the darkness of the blood in my eyes. “I want to go back and kill those kids.”

“You always will,” said Dave. “Shit like this you never forget, believe me.”

He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and passed it over. Felt his hand was shaking. He rolled another for himself and sat back with it, stretching his legs out as far as that tight ship would allow. Smoked in the darkness, bobbing all calm on the river’s endless drift.

“Fuck, kid,” said Dave looking at me in the moonlight. “What did they kick your ass for? Me I can see, but you’re a girl.”

“I guess when you stab some fuckers like I did, well, you’re just fair game after that.”

Dave said, “It’ll be better when we get to a city. No more of this bush-bash shit.”

“They saw us and they saw a couple of freaks. That and you’re an Indian. You’re always asking for it.”

“I got it coming from all sides because Indians hate me too. They know I’m no Indian soon as I open my mouth and talk White like I do.”

Touching his slice, Dave said, “Likely I need stitches. Not that I’ll get any.”

“Could always just staple it shut,” I said. “Or tape it.”

For a while there was darkness enough we did not know if our eyes were open or shut. Wet wounds airing out in the cool of the night. Talked and were silent and talked some more, and then one or both of us said let’s go set their town on fire.

“Better,” I said. “Let’s go ambush their camp.”

So we took off downriver, back from where we’d just fled.