My body was sore from the webcam sessions. I was laying back on my bed and smoking a cigarette, fingering the edges of my belly button. My Snapchat piggy bank said I had $260, and combined with the forty I had left from Mumbaiboy and the funds I made the other day, I had about $420 in total. That would be enough to top up my rent and get my ass to the rez. I figured I’d give ol’ Peggy a call and see if she’d run me to the rez for $300; maybe I could even swindle her into giving me a cheaper price.
I had one more day to get there. I figured if I left early enough tomorrow, I could get there by late afternoon. There was enough time, I thought, as I stared up at my stucco ceiling that looked like bat droppings. I opened the blinds and saw that it was dark outside. The streets of Winnipeg were alit with fluorescents, and the Exchange was quiet save for a few rowdy gangbangers I could see hustling in the alleys. There was a line of taxis waiting for fares along Princess Street. Part of me wanted to celebrate, to yell at someone down on the street to come up and toke with me, but no one was around; even my pigeon neighbour was fast asleep in his nest of bones.
I opened my phone and saw that it was 11:27 p.m. Tias had messaged me a couple times. I texted him back: “Hey you want to come over?” I knew I only had to wait maybe twenty minutes, ten if he had cab money or his bike, for him to show up at my door—but only in NDN time. And what was a few minutes more for that inevitable break-up talk? Sometimes I feel like I should have been born a Cormac, always hitting the road and telling myself, “You can’t stop what’s coming.”
When Tias arrived, he was wearing a band tee and dirty jeans; his breath smelled of Budweiser and his eyes were beginning to glaze over. His lips were crusted with tobacco and roach crumbs. But he flashed the boyish smile that I had come to adore. “Listen, Jonny,” he said as he stepped inside and grabbed my arm to look into my eyes. His other hand held onto one of the empty loops of an eight-pack of Bud. I couldn’t concentrate, looking down at his boxers peeking out from his jeans.
“Jonny, I need to tell you—”
I grabbed him by the waist, took a beer, and motioned for him to sit down. He closed the door behind him and plopped himself down on the couch. I ripped open the can of Bud and felt the cold sensation of it sliding down my throat as I shotgunned the entire beer in front of him.
“Slow down, Vac,” he said, laughing. He patted the seat beside him and unhooked another beer. He passed it to me as I sat down.
“What is it?” I asked.
His lips quivered as if he were bench-pressing too large a weight. And he could lift his weight and then some—I’ve seen him do it. We used to say we were going to get jacked like the NDN boys we saw on television, like Taylor Lautner or Booboo Stewart.
“You see—”
We’d pick up dumbbells, his in the high twenties and mine in the low teens, and curl them in front of each other. Our veins rose and plumped thick as tree roots. He always teased me for needing a spotter. Sure, I was weak—what do you expect of me? I’d say. My arms are thin as roots and I usually only use them to swatch glosses and liquid lipsticks. But when I did lift that bar on my own, which was only once, Tias cheered and slapped me on my thigh, which made me instantly get hard. I was always full of tricks.
“You know, Jordan and me—”
Tias had a ravenous hunger for sex; he had a lot of fucked-up problems, but god, his body, in pain, turned me on to no end. He suffered so delightfully—and then again, maybe I did too. We fucked right there in his foster family’s basement. We hid ourselves by making a fort from old towels held up against the edges of his water heater and dryer. He pushed his tongue so deep down into my throat that it felt more like a dental extraction than love-making, all chase, all coming.
“Jonny, are you even listening?”
He used to hurt me a lot back then, when I didn’t know how to let him inside me without clenching my bottom so tightly that his flesh tore into mine. Our bodies were made of cells that were braided together, and particles of blood, semen, and shit that leaked and oozed out from us—bits of discharge that were both living and dying.
“I got her pregnant, Jon.” He paused, staring me in the eye. “She’s pregnant, Jonny, and I don’t know what to do.” And then he collapsed in on himself like a piece of plastic burning in a bonfire.
I vacuumed the beer I had in my hand and cracked another.
“Well, shit,” I said.