Ragged Company Page 2

  I didn’t know what he meant but found out soon enough. Leaving the missionary school hadn’t changed John at all. In fact, it had made things worse. In the school he’d had targets for his anger but in the outside world he didn’t. So he settled in with a fast downtown crowd of bikers, ex-cons, and drug dealers who were as much like himself as he could find. And he’d earned a reputation as a hellish fighter as well as someone who not only lived by the code of that world but also fought to defend it, protect it, honour it. Everyone was afraid of him. Everyone but me. For me, he always had those eyes. Bloodshot or not, they always held a smile for me and there was a big rough hand to tousle my hair. I had a hero again.

  Life was good. Frank and I got into a school that a lot of other Indian kids attended and our aunt and uncle were pretty free with rules so we got to run around a lot. Frankie still tried to emulate John and he got away with it because he was John One Sky’s brother. Me, I tried to learn to be a little girl but it was hard after all those years. Still, I played the games and ran around like all the rest, content to be with family again.

  The year I turned fourteen someone killed John. They shoved a big knife into his back while he was taking a pee in the washroom of the Regal hotel. When they found him he was laying in a pool of blood and piss, one hand behind his back clasping the handle of that knife. He died trying to pull it out. Always the fighter.

  I didn’t come out of my room for a week. All I remember of that time is a crack in the ceiling. I lay there and stared at that crack until time was lost to me. I shivered from the return of the coldness and that ceiling became a bottomless pit I felt myself tumbling into. In that crack were voices. Voices of the dead, and I could hear Irwin telling me, The water’s great, Amelia, come on in. I heard my parents say, The fire’s warm, there’s tea, come on, little girl, come. Harley’s soft little voice told me, It’s not that far from home, Amelia, all you gotta do is try. And John, my tough, strong, fearless brother, said, Don’t let them take you by surprise, little girl. I heard them all, over and over, and if I slept at all it was the dreamless kind you’re never sure you had. They wanted me. I wanted them. I was tired and the only thing that brought me out of that room alive was Frank.

  Three days after John died Frank had disappeared. He was eighteen, and when I tracked him down at the Regal hotel drinking with John’s crowd, he’d changed. Frank One Sky, he told me, stressing the last two words and poking a thumb against his chest. John’s brother, he said to the nods of a table of new-found friends. I sat with them a while and they made me welcome but wouldn’t let me drink. Frank sat there drinking in the notoriety of being John One Sky’s brother as much as he drank in the beer that came his way from all across that hotel bar. I left him looking like a minor lord, fawned over and protected. As far as I know, he never left the Regal again.

  Word had got out that two people were responsible for John’s death. When they showed up at the Regal, Frank walked over to their table with a baseball bat and crushed both their skulls. He was given two life sentences and sent to a prison a few hundred miles away. When I got the letter telling me he had hung himself in his cell soon after, I sat on the back stoop of Uncle Jack’s house late into the night tearing that letter into small pieces, flicking each of them away and watching the breeze take them skittering across the ground and out of the halo of light beyond the stoop. With each torn shred of paper I felt a piece of myself tear away from whatever held it. Each shred ripped away from me too, until finally I sat there alone, surrounded by death in a place far beyond anger or sadness—a cold universe, empty of stars and silent. Then I walked away. Just got up and walked away. Walked to a table at the Regal and a place on the street.

  John’s crowd surrounded me like angels. I was fifteen. When I reached for dope or drink, they kept it from me. I was a One Sky and that was all that mattered. There’s a code of loyalty on the street, and no matter what the normal people say, that loyalty is strong and deep. I moved around, stayed with hookers, dealers, bikers, and all the other rounders who’d known my brothers and chose to honour them by sheltering me. The Regal became my home. I witnessed beatings, brawls, stabbings, overdoses, seizures, arrests, releases, people shunned, and people accepted like me. Through it all I was shielded by the burly bodies of bikers and their women, and somewhere in that strange and quirky shelter I learned to live again. Not well, not in the accepted normal way, but I found a place in that world and I stayed there. Until I found love.

  Ben Starr was a tall, good-looking Blackfoot from Montana. He’d been on the street for years and when he joined our crowd at the Regal with his long braids and black leather he was accepted as the known rounder that he was. He was twenty-two and I was sixteen. He’d smile at me and nod each time we saw each other and soon we were talking. Ben wanted to be a writer. He wanted to take everything he’d seen and done and turn it into poetry. He’d slip me pieces of paper and I’d run off to the toilet to read them. A lot of it was beyond me, but somehow knowing that it mattered to Ben made it matter to me, and I was in love long before I knew it as love.

  I guess it happens that way. That’s why it’s such a mystery, such a force. Because you find yourself in the middle of whatever kind of life you have and suddenly there’s an edge to all of it that wasn’t there before. Expectation. Hope, you’d call it. You find your life surrounded by a quiet kind of light that warms everything you touch and see. At least that’s how it was for me. And for Ben. I know it was that way for him, too. We moved in together after two months and when we finally united ourselves as man and woman the pain was sharp but elevated me somehow. When he entered me I felt opened up, raised to the world, and presented as a whole new being, freed from the cold and numbness, embraced by a bolder fire than I knew existed before or since. We lay there stoking the blaze and he told me stories. Some of them I knew from books but most were his, told spontaneously, magically, like something unfolding.

  And so we lived. Not in a way most people would call well, but we got by. Ben took the odd day job, and because I didn’t drink or do dope the Regal hired me as a maid. We had a room on the fifth floor with two large windows right beside the big orange neon sign, so that at night our loving was bathed in the soft orange glow. I can’t see that kind of light anymore without a sense of celebration or loss for Ben. See, he had the monkey. Heroin. Morphine. Needles. I knew, of course. Everybody knew. But what a rounder chooses is what a rounder chooses, and only when that starts to affect other people badly is anything said. Most times you’d never know. He was careful, knew his limit, and never went overboard. But monkeys climb and Ben’s was more agile and clever than most. He started to get sick in the mornings and if we didn’t find him some more pretty quickly he’d just disappear and return in the early afternoon, strolling into the Regal calm and unaffected. No one asked him what he did for the money, not even me. It’s one of the things you learn on the street—to never ask. Me, I was just glad to see him.

  He started doing more. Secretly. But he was still loving me hard and being there for me and I guess I believed then that love itself would keep us above it, keep us floating, raised up, safe. But even love’s power has limits and Ben was soon far beyond the border of ours. They found him in the same washroom where they’d found John, the rig still hanging above his elbow, a thin trickle of blood like a tiny river down the muscle of his arm. I know because I saw. Small as I was, there wasn’t anybody big enough to keep me out of there and no one even really tried. I rocked him back and forth in my arms, cradling him, telling him it was going to be okay, to not be afraid and that my family would take care of him. I said it like a prayer and I believed it. When they took him from me I felt something—a warm thing, pliant, round, and complete—leave with a silent tug, and when I walked back into the Regal lounge all that was left was a hole. No cold, no numbness, no ache, no pain, just a hole. I walked over to the bar and started to fill that hole.

  I was drunk for years. Years. Time, when you don’t consider it, has a slipperin
ess, an elusive quality you feel in the hands but shake off fast like water, and I was in the pit a long, long time. Because I was John One Sky’s sister and Ben Starr’s woman they let me go. At first it was out of sorrow for my loss, my losses, the story I would tell in long garbled sentences as long as the pitchers kept coming. Then, it was out of pity for a drunken young woman. Later, when I became untrustworthy and a pest, they let me go completely. So I wandered from party to party, bottle to bottle, man to man. I sold myself along the way, and that was the cruellest thing, betraying my beloved Ben for enough money to keep on drinking. But finally, the years, the miles, the parties, the puke, the jails, and abuses broke me down and no one wanted me that way anymore. I stank. I slept in parks, doorways, abandoned buildings, and hobo jungles, stumbling into a world fortified by shaving lotion, mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, or whatever was handy. If there was a God in the world, he’d overlooked me and I became a crier, a weeper, tearfully begging change from passersby. Until the shadowed ones came.

  I started seeing them everywhere. At first I’d rub my eyes, shake my head, and gulp down a mouthful of whatever I had to chase away what I thought for sure were DT’s. But they stayed. Not real people, not even what you’d call ghosts, just hints, vague outlines I saw everywhere. Alleys, parks, windows of buildings, on the street, everywhere I looked I saw them—felt them, really—not able to disbelieve fully or convince myself of their presence. Shadowed ones. The ones whose spirits can never leave this earth, the ones tied here by a sorrow, a longing stronger than life and deeper than death. When drinking wouldn’t drive them away and the haunting got too much to handle, I walked into detox one day and quit drinking. Just quit. Suddenly, I was forty-four. I looked eighty. I felt older than a thousand years.

  Hospital was best, they said. I was there a month drying out and learning to eat again. From there I went to a women’s program where I could have stayed as long as I wanted, but there was no one there I could really talk to. They were either really young and cocky or older and playing at being sophisticated. Those ones called their drinks “highballs,” “cocktails,” or other long names a galaxy away from the “rubby,” “crock,” or “juice” that I knew. And the walls drove me crazy. I felt penned up, frozen to the spot, and even though I knew they would have tried to help me, the street was in my bones and I went back to the only world I knew and understood. They were waiting for me—the shadowed ones. I’d have been about four months’ sober by then, so I knew that it wasn’t the booze or DT’s making me see them. No, death has a presence—thick and black and cold—and when you live so close to it for so long you get so you can see it. Feel it. Accept it and not be afraid. Everyone has a mourning ground, a place where the course of a life turned, changed, altered, or disappeared forever. It could be a house, a park, or just a place on the pavement where the wrong words were said, the worst choice made, or fateful action taken. Our spirits are linked to these places forever and when our sorrow’s deep enough we return to them again and again to stand in our pain, reliving the memory, mumbling clumsy prayers that we might be offered a chance to change what happened, bend time so we could choose again. But it never happens. The shadowed ones just keep on doing that after death, returning to those places where their wounds are buried, hoping against hope that something in the walls or ground might emerge to save them. Mourning grounds. We all have them and it’s only in learning how to live with our hurts while we’re here that we’re set free of them. When I came to understand that at age forty-four, I knew where I had to be. Where I needed to be. For them, the shadowed ones on the street that no one ever sees, the living dead. The homeless.

  So I went back and lived as one of them. But I never drank again. Instead, I’d make runs for them when they were sick, nurse them when they needed it, or just be around—a voice, an ear, a shoulder—and by doing that I eased my own pain. When a fresh bottle arrived I always asked to open it. See, there’s an old rounder ritual you hardly see anymore. When a bottle’s opened you pour a small bit on the ground and say “there’s one for the dead.” That’s what I would always do and that’s where I got my name. One For The Dead One Sky. I’ve been here for twenty years and Amelia, little Amelia, resides in a place of memory, standing at all her places of mourning, shedding tears that salve her bruises, offering prayers that set her free. And the river is just a river after all, neither tepid nor cold, with a long log on the other side where the sun shines down like a spotlight from heaven, enveloping my family, my Ben, keeping them warm for me.

  Digger

  DYING COLD SUCKS. Trust me. I know. I’ve come close enough to know. Stumbled out of more than a few alleys in my time shivering and shaking like a fucking booze seizure with the cold so deep in the bones your heart feels like it’s pumping ice. It takes a shitload more than a few slops of sherry to get the feeling back. Most times you spend the whole fucking day trying to shake it off: coffee at the Mission, hanging out in the doorways of malls until the rental bulls chase you off, knocking back some hard stuff. It’s a tough business.

  So when they told me that they found three of us dead on the first night of the cold snap I almost felt sorry. Almost. See, there’s only two ways you die on the street. One is by being stupid. The other’s called unlucky. Ducky Dent was stupid. He was a binge drinker. One of those guys who’d pull it together long enough to score a job, grab a flop, and run the straight and narrow for a time. Then, boom. Goes off like a fucking cannon, loses it all, hits the bricks again, sucking back everything from Jim Beam at the high end to shaving lotion and Listerine at the bottom end. There’s a lot like Ducky Dent. But they never last. The street’s got an edge to it that’ll slice you like a fucking razor if you’re not tough enough. Besides, we all knew the cold was coming. The cops and the street patrols and the rest of the Square John do-gooders told us all about this arctic front—a killer cold, they said—and made all the usual moves to get us to move inside at night. Most did. But hard-core guys like me know how to cope. Ducky wasn’t hard-core. He wasn’t even what you’d call a rounder. Just a stupid fuck who couldn’t drink. He scored two bottles of sherry and a blanket, camped out in the doorway of some hair joint, and died. When they found him there was only one empty bottle beside him and the full one was curled against his chest. Passed out and froze. Sad? Sort of. Stupid? Big time.

  Big Wolf McKay was unlucky. She’d been street for years and knew the ropes. Called her Big Wolf because she’d be in DT’s and running around babbling that there was a big wolf tracking her down. She’d been drinking with one of her pals on the east side and was trying to make it back to the shelter for the night. Thin summer coat, too much booze, and real fucking cold was too much. She sat down to rest in a bus shelter, nodded off, and froze stiff as a board. A bus driver shook her shoulder to wake her up and she fell right over. We’ll miss her. She was one of the solid ones, always willing to share, always ready to do a run when you were sick, and never ever went south with your money. Unlucky.

  It was the same with East Coast Willy. His dream was always to go home to the sea. He said that for years and for a while he’d even lived in a packing crate labelled Newfoundland. Willy was a rounder. Been around since anyone can remember but never got his dream. See, the street’s got claws, big, tough fucking claws that grip you once you been on it long enough, and shit like dreams stay dreams, coming and going like handfuls of change. Willy knew how to cope. He took his wraps and laid up on a warm air grate in an alley. But he lay down the wrong way. A delivery truck backed up that alley first thing in the morning and ran right over his head. Squashed his fucking melon flat. Turned the other way, he’d have been crippled at most but now he was dead. They say his body was warm when the cops and ambulance got there, so I knew he’d have made it through the cold except for being unlucky.

  Three in one night. The Square Johns all tish-tosh over the stories in the news, say how sad and pitiful it is, how something should be done—but five minutes later they forget. Because they don’t really give
a fuck, and they don’t have to. Shit, to tell the truth, a lot of us out here couldn’t give a fuck either. Because we don’t have to. Out here you got yourself and that’s that. You stretch out and start to give a part of yourself away to others and you set yourself up. Set yourself up to be used, drained, tossed away. Me, I keep to myself. That’s why I say I almost felt sorry about the three dead ones. I’ll never be one of those street people all weepy and crying over shit. You live on concrete long enough, you pick up the nature of it: cold, hard, and predictable. It’s called survival and every rounder knows it. Me, I’m a rounder. I’m concrete. Poured, formed, and set.

  Being a rounder’s just what it sounds like. You go around and around the same old vicious fucking circle until you’ve seen and done and survived everything. At first, it’s just life screwing with you. Nobody comes here by choice. Life just fucks with you and you land here and once you do you find out real fast whether you have the stones to deal with it or not. Most don’t. Because it’s a hard go. I mean, you take anybody, plunk them down on the bricks with a handful of nothing but the clothes on their back and say “go.” The majority’ll run back to wherever it is they came from lickety-fucking-split. The stubborn ones, the ones with rebel bones, will try to hack it but it takes a shitload more than a handful of attitude to learn to live out here. So the rebels and the weepers disappear real quick. But a rounder, well, a rounder is a special fucking breed. See, the street wears people, breaks them down, but a rounder wears the street.

  I choose to live how I live and I don’t need any Square John pity or do-gooder helping hands. Even in a bitter fucking cold like that I need nothing but my balls and my brains to see me through. That’s what makes me a rounder—balls and brains in equal measure. Any other balance, one way or the other, and you’re dead. Stone cold, stiff as a frozen fucking board dead. Just like them three.