Tias and I used to hustle Mush when we were kids. I liked my mushom, he was a gentle, soft-spoken man who loved Werther’s caramels and Budweiser. He used to buy me party-sized chocolate bars, like those Jumbo Mr. Bigs that were twice the size of your head. He wasn’t NDN like us, but Kokum insisted we call him Mushom. His real name was Pierre LeClerc and he was the luckiest, and only, môniyâw on the reservation. He won $100,000 on a scratch ticket when he was in his thirties and from then on out he became popular among the family and all the rez girls. He bought my mom a used Cadillac Seville and that forced her to called him Mush—half liking him, half detesting him. He used the remainder of his winnings to buy a gas station that was quite successful while he was alive. He liked to give all the NDN kids a piece of candy whenever they visited, and overloaded their bags with Twizzlers and Pop-Rocks on Halloween. He was a dandy fellow.
But there were better ways to get money from him than by simply asking. Sure, if you asked kindly enough, he’d throw you a few dollars, maybe ten bones if you were really lucky, and then shame you for it when he was on his benders. If there’s one rule I’ve learned from hustling, it’s never to put yourself into a situation where you owe somebody—always leave your clients owing you. Though, if you were patient enough, you could swindle forty to fifty bones from Mush by waiting for him to pass out and collecting all his empties. His house would be littered with aluminum: cans in his sink, cans in his bed, cans in the pockets of his coat, crumpled in his war chest. Tias and I used to wait at his place and listen to him and Kokum tell us stories about the good ol’ days which would usually erupt into an argument about who had it worse—that’s the thing about old folks, they think life is a competition of scars and suffering.
When Mush passed out and Kokum kept herself busy calling everyone she knew on the phone, Tias and I would begin collecting cans like the hermit crabs that cleaned the aquariums in those city pet stores. After we had loaded up two recycle bags’ worth, we’d take them to the vendor and exchange them for forty dollars. After we split the cash, we’d go to Mush’s gas station and load up on all types of candy: gummies, chocolates, peppermints, Eskimo Pie, and everyone’s personal favourite, Nestle Redskins. Usually, if we didn’t have enough for what we wanted, one of us would distract Mush’s cashier and the other would load candy into their coat.
With what little money we had left, we’d buy a few cigarettes from the junior high chumps who stole them from their moms. They actually made decent money by selling cigarettes for a dollar. Then we’d take our goods back home to gorge on the candy as we watched Ren and Stimpy late into the night. High on sugar, we’d then smoke the cigarettes to give ourselves a head rush and walk around the room light-headed and dizzy—it was the closest we could get to being fucked up as ten-year-olds. Sometimes we would take turns puffing on Kokum’s inhaler too, until she caught on and gave us both a damn good slap with her wooden spoon. That’s how we thought it was, that being drunk and high were natural processes to growing up.
There were times, if I looked pitiful enough, like a brown-skin Annie singing “It’s a Hard Knock Life” sad, that my kokum would let Tias stay over on weekends. We would both sleep upstairs in my uncle’s old bedroom, but before we did we’d argue about who got to sleep against the wall, which was always way cooler. To beat the heat, we’d jack the small fan from my kokum’s bedroom and put it in ours, which also helped to drown out the clanging of their bottles downstairs—it disrupted our watching of Boy Meets World. While Tias raved over how beautiful Topanga was, I swooned over Shawn. And the real name of the actor who played him was so erotically charged for me: Rider Strong. I used to whisper it to myself to fall asleep because I liked the way it sounded when I inserted a heavy breath into the spaces between its syllables. I would lay my tongue down on the bottom of my mouth and let the air vibrate and stimulate them: “Riiide,” “der,” “Strawwng.” A good name makes the perfect sex toy.
Sometimes there would be a party downstairs, and we’d sneak down and watch my kokum, Mush, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins, the gas station employees, a tribal officer, and a cavalcade of brown-skins dance around to Loretta Lynn. As Loretta wailed about her man not coming home a-drinking, I would tiptoe into the room and say goodnight to everyone. Funny, the people who loved me the most could only tell me so between two and three in the morning. Then, while they professed their love and pride for me, I’d sneak a couple beers into the pockets of my sweatpants. Back upstairs, Tias and I would crack them open and pretend we thought they tasted good.
“Damn good beer, eh?” Tias said on one such night.
“I’ve had better, you know?” I replied.
“No, that’s the name,” he said. “Damn Good Beer, Minhas Creek—wonder where the Damn Good Chips are?”
We buckled with a laugh that ran so deeply through our bodies that our abs hurt afterwards. Then we flipped through the late-night channels, mostly old white women trying to sell patches for varicose veins and Chyna wrestling in the WWF, until we settled on the Showcase Channel and watched a show called KinK. There was a drag queen who was putting on makeup and kaikaiing with another queen. The taller of the two backed the other against the wall, slid her hand up the other’s thigh, and slowly raised her dress, revealing the garters underneath. The shorter one then pulled the other’s hands up against her body and wrapped her legs around her. We were both mesmerized.
Afterwards, while we both tried to sleep, Tias asked me if I thought that scene looked like fun. I giggled and said yeah. He laughed, but then he slid closer to me and I felt his hand on my leg. I rolled onto his chest and spread both of my legs over his torso. We started giggling, our bodies vibrating with each other’s. It felt like we were a guitar and our lungs and esophagus were being strummed like strings. Fitting, I thought, as we made our own music and let our limbs dance their own ballet without ever moving. Downstairs, Loretta howled in the background that the squaw was on the warpath tonight. We fell asleep like buttons in buttonholes.
The next morning, when the sun was rising, my mom came into our room and nudged my shoulder.
“The heck you doing, boy?”
She put her arms under my pits and raised me up. I wrapped my arms and legs around her and breathed her in, the smoke, the booze, the sweat and tears that made up her perfume. She rubbed the wetness from my eyes, which she called sleepies, and kissed my cheek. I opened my eyes wider and saw a patch of blood on her dry lips, and the black mascara streaming down her face. Even in my half-asleep state, I was both afraid and concerned.
“What happened?” I asked.
“M’boy,” she said, pulling my face against her breast and starting to cry. “I’m not the drink, I swear, okay? I’m not the drink.”
She put me back into bed beside Tias, who was still asleep, and covered us with a blanket. She kissed us both on the forehead and said, “My boys, kisâkihitin.”
I could hear Roger calling her from downstairs, his shout sounding more like the pitiful welp of a dog licking its wounds after a fight.
“Mom?” I said. “Can you lay with me until I fall asleep?”
She smiled and crawled in between Tias and me, pulling us tight against her body. Tias was stirring now, and both of us nuzzled our sleepy heads against her, until her heartbeat lulled us back to sleep. When we finally woke up later, we discovered that one of us had pissed the bed.
We never found out who.