Bone Dance (6 page)

“What?” he said when Lonny was in midstream, middream. Then he laughed nervously. “That's
weird
shit, man.”

“Yeah, weird.” Lonny laughed, too.

After that, day after day went by with Robert talking on and on about nothing. Lonny let him talk and could tell that he was relieved no mention was made of his mother's spirit again.

He sleepwalked through his days, nudged by dreams, getting A's and B's with his mind half-awake. His English teacher, Miss Samson, handed him a paper he'd done on a poem by Dylan Thomas. “Good work, once again, Mr. LaFrenière,” she said, and then
frowned at the bags under his eyes. “I hope you're planning on going to university next year.”

At the beginning of February, Robert said he was bored. “Everybody's bored, Lon,” he said, “and that's because it's winter. And so we've got to do something about it.”

He suggested they round up some Ski-Doos and a few people and go down to the old LaFrenière place and have a party. “Come on, Lon,” he urged. “You've been all weird lately. And you need cheering up. And I'll bet not a single person has been down there since Earl kicked the bucket. So what'll it hurt?”

“I don't want to go down there,” said Lonny.

But Robert wasn't listening, and he was so fired up, there was no stopping him. A couple of days later, people were coming up to Lonny in the halls at school. By Saturday night, nineteen people showed up at the top of the snowed-in trail, piling out of cars, unloading snowmobiles off the backs of family trucks. They showed up with cases of beer, tequila, gin, and cheap wine. It was fiercely cold, and the snow was waist deep in places. A caravan of lights wound down through the bush, everybody yelling and laughing past dark, silent winter trees.

At Earl's cabin, Tyler Lakusta, giggling like he was already drunk, pulled off his leather mitt, fumbled under his jacket and layers of sweaters for his wallet. While somebody shone a flashlight, he used his bank card to gentle the lock on Earl's door. It was easy. And it was wrong.

Charlene McLean had brought candles, and she
pulled off her boots at the door and told people they had to wait outside until they were lit. And when they finally did go in, it felt as if they were entering a church, candlelight flickering up the walls. Lonny half expected to see Earl laid out in a coffin in a suit even though he'd been cremated last month.

Charlene, her thick black hair hanging down her back in a single braid, opened her arms up wide and threw them around Lonny and yelled, “Surprise!”

And then everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” and all he could do was stand there, stunned, because his eighteenth birthday wasn't until next week, but this was his party, obviously, and Robert had planned it all.

Later as the woodstove and all the bodies inside heated the cabin up, people got loud and drunk. Robert and John Tessier and Curt Mason and Morgen Thiessen staggered outside and stood in a snowdrift and pulled down their pants and mooned the moon. Tyler lured Marianne Neufeld off to Earl's bedroom, where she threw up in his lap.

Charlene came and sat beside Lonny on the living-room floor. She offered him a cold marshmallow from a bag she'd ripped open with her teeth.

“Hey, Charlene,” he said softly.

“Hey, Lon. Are you having a good time?”

He shivered and looked at her glowing face. He'd known her ever since they were in second grade. All of them, all of the girls—Charlene, and Tammy Martel and Marianne Neufeld and Sherry-Lynne Baker and Jen “the Bird” Nightingale—had gone from wide-eyed
seven-year-olds into golden-lidded women, it seemed, overnight. And now they seemed like strangers.

“Thanks for the candles,” he said. “They look nice.”

She drew a circle in the dust on Earl's floor. She turned to him, her warm eyes drawing him in. “You into this stuff?” And she went on, “Circle of life? Medicine wheels? Some eternal plan?”

“Not me.” He smiled. “I'm just a bad godless boy. But my mom was. She had a gift for life. She could even see light… on trees.”

“You mean like their auras?”

“I guess. Man, am I drunk,” he went on, embarrassed.

“No, you're not,” said Charlene.

He shrugged. “People think you're a fruit loop when you talk about stuff like that.”

“Lonny”—Charlene put her arm around him, resting her head on his shoulder—“don't you know what people think of you?”

He laughed. “What
do
they think of me, Charlene?”

“And I'm not including your girlfriends now,” she said. “Because, let's be honest, you're hell to have as a boyfriend. But you are a great friend. You know that? You listen to people. You make them feel like they could be anything, do anything. That's a gift. That's a real gift.”

“I do that?” he said in amazement.

“Yeah,” she said, snuggling closer. “Boy, it's cold. Put your arm around me. Tell me something good.”

Alex dreamed of snow. A small cabin. A shiny window. Her grandfather's hand along her back. “Look, Alexandra.” Brilliant snow, brilliant sky. The top of a hill. And suddenly a raven, flying out of the woods, sunlight tipping its wings.

During the day she sat and doodled black rocks on her purple plastic binder and got memory flashes of her dreams of the night before. Strange dreams. Crackling sticks and coals. The soft plunk of snow hitting the bottom of an iron pot. The rattle of tin cups. Cold lips slurping tea. Soft voices. Clicking tongues. The monotone of a language that was an unfamiliar landscape—her grandfather and someone else. Inside her mind, inside her sleepy mind, she was an animal, curled in warm furred sleep, listening to the blizzard outside batter and whine against the cabin door.

She and Serena and Peter Shingoose went to a party at Andrea Larkin's. Peter drank a lot of tequila, and then she and Serena spent the rest of the night sitting with him in the bathroom. At one point he slid down
into Serena's lap and told her, “You're a goddess. And I'm a sad Adonis. I think I love you.” Serena laughed, hugged him close.

He didn't show up at school on Monday, and Serena wanted to go over to his house “to see if he's okay.” Tuesday, he showed up with a rose for Serena. Wednesday, she and Serena had another huge fight.

The first time she ever noticed Peter Shingoose he was hoop dancing at a powwow at the Convention Centre. She'd hauled Serena along. It was three weeks after their patch-up over the pen incident, and Serena was still in a mood of atonement. The floors pounded. The drumbeats came right up through her feet to her heart and made her cry. She felt like a fool, but she couldn't stop the tears. They flowed nonstop. Serena, dry-eyed, was astonished by all the color and the rhythm, and then all at once she said, pointing, “That guy is in my drama class.”

There was Peter out on the floor in full costume, all feathers and hoops. He danced like a gorgeous bird. Alex's palms began to sweat.

He came up to them later, flashing a bone white smile at Serena. Alex couldn't breathe, her heart was pounding so. He won't notice me, she thought at that very moment. He'll only notice Serena because she's so beautiful. Serena always has boyfriends. She doesn't give a damn if she's tall and big and powerful. She just looks them in the eye, and they fall like bricks.

“You have to act more confident,” Serena had told her back in the ninth grade. “When you're made the way we are, it's the only way you're ever going to be
popular.” This remark was coming from the same person who had pretended to paint them both with invisible paint when they were five, so they wouldn't be noticed on their first day of school.

Well, Serena can have him, she then thought, looking at a point past Peter's ear so she wouldn't have to look directly at him again. He's too good-looking anyway. He's probably just a big snob.

But, as it turned out, he wasn't. And for the past six months they had been a constant threesome.

It wasn't that Alex never had sort-of boyfriends. You hung out. They kissed you, stuck their tongues in your mouth, grabbed you, played stupid mind games, power games, wanted you to come home with them when their parents weren't there. It was all very boring. And they knew Alex was bored, and it scared them. She wasn't small, and she didn't want to stand around under somebody's arm and be popular. Maybe there was something wrong with her. They never moved her. Nobody moved her until Peter. She would write his name in the pattern of a heart and draw an arrow through it. She would think about him as she lay in bed at night, a slow fire creeping up between her legs, into her belly. She wanted him to touch her here. And here. And here. She could never let on to anybody, especially Serena, how he made her feel.

Serena and Peter walked together in the halls at school, and Serena's eyes were shiny with light, and Peter drew her close every time someone was looking.

“You don't even like her,” Alex said to Peter a
week after this had been going on. Heavyhearted, as weighted as a mountain to the earth, she added, “You're just playing a big pretend game.”

“I like her,” said Peter, a big-eyed liar.

“She's not your type.”

He folded his arms across his chest, shook his hair out of his eyes, stared hard at her, angry, proud, eyes glittering. “Since when do you get to tell me who I can go out with?”

Peter left notes for Serena on her locker.
Meet me later. Love you madly
. Then he wouldn't show up. Andrea Larkin told Alex, “Peter says you and Serena had a terrible fight. Are you okay?”

She took refuge in sleep. Snow drifted across the cabin floor. Grandpa and some other spirit sat right there. Right in the kitchen. In yellow chairs. Grandpa slightly smaller. The other tall and thin and old, like a large and baggy raven. White hair flowing over the collar of a too-big black overcoat. Both of them as still as stone, snow resting in delicate drifts on their shoulders.

In the waking world, Mom looked haggard and ashen. She was always upstairs in her office. She made tense phone calls. Tripped over boxes of waiting tax files. Dashed out to meet with clients. Drank too much coffee.

One late afternoon, the sunset slanting through the window onto her computer, she sat, face practically absorbed by the screen, and Alex reached out one hand to unknot the tension at the back of her neck.

“God, that feels good,” said Mom, dropping her head. “You've got healing hands, kid.”

Then, lifting her head, she pulled Alex down in the chair beside her, with a soft “C'mere.” Arms came around her, holding her in place in a firm hug. “I want to talk to you about something. I've set up a trust fund for you. With the money Earl left. I didn't want to just leave it in a bank somewhere, hardly collecting any interest.”

Alex squirmed away. She went and sat down on the futon with the gold-colored throw. Shivering, she drew the throw around herself. She thought she might be sick.

“Anytime I bring up the property or the money,” Mom said, pushing a tired hand through her hair, “you run away.” She turned back to her computer, squinted her eyes painfully.

Two days later, Francine stood in the middle of the parking lot at Wal-Mart, where she had just purchased another set of towels that she didn't need. “Alex,” she said, poking the key into the car door, “she's worried about you. And, of course, she comes to me about it. Why do you two always pussyfoot around each other's feelings? For goodness' sake, your mother isn't that fragile.”

When Mom brought the subject up again, Alex said she was tired. “And I have a headache,” she added, watching her mother's face crumple in disappointment.

She turned, made her way up the stairs, and could feel her mother, below, still watching her. Then just as she reached the bedroom door, Mom called out,
“You're going to have to start making some decisions. Have you picked up your University of Manitoba application yet?”

“I'll do it tomorrow.”

“Deadline for application is March the third.”

“I know that, Mom. I said I'll do it.”

Her walking-around visions were frost laced. In biology lab she delicately dissected a frog, and all the while, dancing green northern lights crackled and whispered and invaded her nostrils with ozone.

Standing in the middle of Harmony Drugs one slushy day, balancing a box of tampons in one hand and a bottle of hair spray in the other, she had a vision of her grandfather as a young man, dressed in caribou skins and wearing his red Tansi Lumber cap. He walked right past her and joined the old raven man, his spirit friend in the black coat, who floated down aisle four and pointed incredulously at his own image on the TV monitor.

It was almost one o'clock. She had a class first period in the afternoon. Her legs felt leaden as she made her way toward the front. She was startled to see Peter standing at the checkout counter.

He turned around, looked at her over his sunglasses, turned back to the flirty candy-colored cashier, handed over a few bills and some change, turned around again. This exchange was all very surreal, like a painting she once saw, in blazing southwestern colors, of a coyote driving a red convertible past lime green cactus plants.
He had a balloon coming out of his mouth that said, “Hey, baby, what's new?” The painting cost thousands of dollars.

“Want a ride back?” he offered, leaning against the checkout counter.

“No,” she said.

“Sure you do. Please?”

In his car, on their way to school, the dream catcher on his rearview mirror swayed hypnotically back and forth.

“Can't we at least be friends?” he said at last.

She looked straight ahead.

“Things are in a mess,” he said, adding softly, “I don't know what to do about Serena. I started something I can't handle. My life's one big lie. The only time I ever feel like myself is when I'm dancing.”