Stolen Life (28 page)

I screamed so loud my own ears rang and I could not stop. It was my legs cramping back, my feet bent outwards rigid as rocks.
I tried to get up, to stand, and my feet and legs twisted tighter, harder. I fell down on the floor still screaming. He jumped up and ran out, but after a while he came back and tried to help me. I was groaning, rolling in pain, my legs and feet splayed out stiff as if they were bent iron, but when he touched them it was even worse. He tried his best to calm me, poor boy, but he and I never got to try again and find out about possibly good sex because he was long gone. I couldn’t understand why his touching me like that twisted my body into an excruciating contortion. It just terrified me more about sex. My mom must be right: the fire of hell lived between my legs; just leave it alone and keep everybody away. At some point in spring we moved back to Winnipeg, on Selkirk west of Main, and from there I was shipped back to Butte again. For more operations on my lip, and Dad living alone, waiting for me.

Minnie was tough beyond belief. The same evening that she arrived in Winnipeg frozen, she asked me how much cash I had. One dollar. She said, good, that’s entrance fee, get yourself fixed up, it’s time for you to live and learn. She was older. I still thought she knew what she was doing, and off we went to the Manor Hotel. Beer cost ninety-nine cents a bottle; she ordered one, poured half into the glass for me, and swallowed twice from the bottle. Then she left me alone at the table—I didn’t know it but I was being used as young meat set out to attract attention—and in a few minutes she was back with guys who kept us supplied till closing time. She drank and I covered her back, got her home safe. I learned to drink beer, and settled in with her showing me how to start every night. We came to be called the Gruesome Twosome, and for good reason.

In the next months we were eighty-sixed out of every bar on the skid; only the toughest, the Occidental Hotel on North Main, would have us, and that became my home bar, my daily place, my hell on earth. No one knew or asked our real names, or where we lived; she was “Four-foot-fuck-all” and I was “Long Streaks of Misery.” It suited me, I was grim-faced, quiet, deadly when I had to be. I could fight alone like a man and never spoke unless spoken to, and then only a word or two. I never smiled,
only a bit when I danced. Serious, don’t cross me or I’ll fight to the finish. Minnie never called me Vonnie; she’d yell across the crammed Occidental bar, “Hey, Streaks!” and everybody’d look over at me and laugh. That was the time in the seventies when the streaking craze of running naked through a crowd was slowly fading, but I was all dressed and never cracked a smile, I’d just go to her.

I learned how to handle myself. I never travelled in a pack like most street women who can’t fight; they gang-pile their enemies. I thought them gutless. I could always count on Minnie to stand with me if she was around and sober enough, though basically she had the attitude “So you couldn’t handle it and you got fucked, well, you’ll get fucked again, forget it,” and I learned to take care of my own back.

Minnie tried to stand with me, but she really didn’t care: she accepted abuse—it’s the price you pay, forget it, c’mon, let’s party—she never had the reaction, like I always did, to fight back until either you win or you’re beaten down to the ground. By age nineteen, Minnie had already resigned herself to take whatever kind of violence she got battered with. However often it happened, she simply refused to think about it.

But if you refuse to take the shit the world dumps on you—if, like me, you fight back—it’s actually safer being alone. My rules were: never drink or appear drunk on the street, never sell your ass, never hang out with horny old White guys, stand alone. Then you never have to confront anyone with “Where were you when I needed you?” That’s how vendettas start, and some day you get jumped anyway by someone you thought was your friend for something you can’t even recall from years back. Depend only on yourself was my rule, and if they crowd your space or gang-pile you and you’re going down, take as many as possible with you, maybe they won’t try it again. Both women and men tried to recruit me, but what was the point? Fight their problems too? On the street I decided I was born alone and that’s the way I’d go out: alone.

Of all the fights I won or lost or got out of, I know I’m part of the hidden, sometimes forgotten-for-a-little-while-but-never-erased
sorrow of the many people I knew who, like me then, lived on Winnipeg’s Indian skid, one of the biggest aboriginal peoples’ hell-holes on earth. I never worked the street as a hooker; on welfare days there were lots of Indians splurging, showing off their temporary money. I had casual work here and there, always temporary. I went to parties for the booze, but mostly I walked the streets by myself or spent time at “party houses” where people drank night and day, steadily.

I basically lived on the streets because Mom wanted me out of her house. I was seventeen; she told me it was time for me to get out and live with someone. But I didn’t shack up; I’d go home to change, have a shower, sleep, heal from fights, whatever was necessary, but Mom really did not want me around. She always worked, and her hang-around Calvin hated me.

One summer day Calvin came in with a baseball bat and smashed it down in the centre of the table where Minnie and I sat quietly having a drink. He yelled he’d beat us both to pulp, useless bitches. Panfaced, I walked to the kitchen cupboard and took out two butcher knives. I laid one on the table in front of Minnie and sat down with the other in front of me and took another slow swallow of beer.

“If he hits me,” I told Minnie in my calmest voice, “you split his guts. If he goes for you, I will.”

That was me then at seventeen: no talk, never smile, walk alone, never look anyone in the eye to make them feel threatened. Never a word of personal talk to anyone, not Mom or Karen or Kathy or Minnie. I didn’t know or think what was the matter with me—and something was seriously the matter—but if a direct threat was made, an action required, I knew exactly what to do: lay it out clear and simple as a bat in hand and two knives on the table.

Calvin couldn’t face Minnie and me. He walked off, yelling, into the living room, came back without the bat, and grabbed one of our knives, started waving it around in the air, ranting even louder. Performance. He was all shithead actor and I lost it. I jumped him, knife and all, with a beer bottle. I beat him over the head till the bottle broke and so did he; he ran to his
room, grabbed his clothes, and left. I looked out the window: he was sitting by the garbage bin without a shirt on, bloody all over, and drinking a twenty-sixer. Finally he was gone. After an hour the city police were at our door, looking for him. I said I didn’t know, but gave them the bat.

“If you see him, tell him he forgot this. He tried to use it on my sister and me.”

They took it, and left.

My shadow tactics and silence kept me out of the worst. Nevertheless, I could not avoid completely being preyed upon, violated.

For me, North Main, Winnipeg, is skinner city, full of pathetic, feeble, sexless men with their conscience destroyed. They wait till women are passed out, either from booze or drugs, and then they brutalize and rob them, and sometimes it’s done by a crowd of men daring each other on. Native men do this a lot, especially to Native women—a dreadful shame on our people, but they prey on each other’s suffering. To be taught how to suck, fuck, drink, and fight is a very hard, cruel way to live; to survive it you have to act adult before you know you’re doing it. Becoming an adult in a beer bottle is small and limiting; you never have time to grow wiser, you never know better than to try and stay where things are familiar and you can somehow handle them because you’ve already had to. You notice other people of course, especially the rich and apparently happy ones driving by in cars, walking into neat houses, but you know that can never be you. That’s already impossible.

By example I was shown how to drink and fight, but I was never taught what it meant to be a woman—except what I understood to be the shame of it. All Mom ever told me was, “Mark my words, you’ll find out! You’re asking for it and you’ll get it.” Despite all her experience of residential school, working and looking for work, drinking, marriage and giving birth, and suffering, she never explained much to me; she lived as she could until forced to plough straight ahead into whatever awaited her. She’d say, “Look at Jane; she gets drunk, she passes out and men take turns on her—so don’t get drunk!” Easy to say.

Or she’d give me her brand of comfort, “You got hurt, the damage is done. It’s not my fault. You made your bed, now lie in it; stop pitying yourself; don’t cry over spilt milk; get on with it …”—all the useless clichés of a beaten life. So I never told her anything of what happened to me; nor did she ask.

She did come with me when the police caught up with me about the Douglas Barber case in Butte. One day around New Year’s, 1979, four cops stood on the porch of our house in Winnipeg when I opened the door: two
RCMP
and two plain-clothes Montana State marshalls. I was alone at home, and they were so enormous they surrounded me like a wall sitting in the living room. I had broken probation in Butte, I was subpoenaed to be a witness at the Frank Shurtliffe trial. The initial charge of manslaughter in the death of Douglas Barbour had been changed to one of murder, and Yvonne was to be called as a witness for the Prosecution. So Mom took leave from her job and flew with me a whole day, through Minneapolis and Great Falls, to Helena. Dad, with Perry, drove up from Butte to meet us.

The prosecuting lawyers told me how to comb my hair and gave Mom money to buy me a dress. Mom said nothing. She took me out and bought the ugliest dress in Helena because she said anything nice was whorish. The trial was in Boulder, and there Frank sat with his lawyer, the first time I’d seen him since that nightmare night. Mom and Dad were in the gallery, side by side. I kept my head down, looked at nothing, and said what the lawyers told me: I knew nothing, it was hazy and long ago, I didn’t remember. I felt really bad for Frank, but what could I do? He and Barber were grown men fighting each other in the snow up on the mountain, why had they hauled a young girl into it? His lawyer was terrifying to me; he used words I couldn’t understand and I told him so. He finally threw his pen in the air and said, “She’s either lying or just stupid—no further questions!” and the judge let me go. I was to be escorted back to Canada.

In the motel Dad slept on the floor, Mom and Perry on the mattress, and I on the boxspring. We were all packed up to leave when suddenly Dad was yelling at Mom that she’d stolen the top plate of his false teeth! We looked everywhere, unpacked the
car, every bag—nothing—and he wondered if maybe he’d swallowed them. He began patting his stomach to see if he could feel them, and then he got a strange expression on his face and ran into the washroom: his teeth were hanging in the crotch of his underwear. So when we took off in opposite directions we were laughing.

I never personally knew what Frank was convicted of until 1993. Then, when Dad visited me in P4W, he told me the sentence was 77 years for some degree of manslaughter, but that he had now been granted parole and was out of prison. On our flight back to Canada, Mom said if Frank ended up in the same jail as Leon and something happened to him, it would be my fault. Otherwise she said nothing. When I tried to talk about it she told me to shut up, there was nothing to brag about. The last comment Mom made on the whole Barber–Shurtliffe mess was when we landed in Winnipeg. She told me:

“I’ve never been as ashamed of any of my children as I am of you.”

All I had left was street people, and I really took to skid-row.

My first pregnancy came about by rape when I was seventeen, and a pretty Native woman set me up for it. At a house on Pacific Avenue, after she invited me to a party and drugged my beer so I passed out and remembered nothing, all night with six guys. Some were her relatives, she told me. I knew something vile had happened, but not what, and it worried me. A few days later I was in the Occidental again, having a drink with a new friend—young, beautiful, and a complete skid innocent—and this same woman came over from a table where she was sitting with those same Indian men and asked if she wanted to go to a party. I said maybe, and she said, “Not you, just her.”

I said I wouldn’t let her go alone, and the woman just laughed. “Those guys? You fucked them yourself, every one of them—remember the party in the green house on Pacific?”

The guys were braying at me from their table, and somehow I knew it was true, I just couldn’t remember. She controlled them in her house and she’d watched them do it. I was enraged, I called her on it then and there, but the bouncer knew I’d clean
her clock and pushed me out before I could do it. I put the young girl in a taxi and I swore revenge on each of them, as long as it would take. I beat up two of those fuckers, sitting and laughing at me, later that night when they left the bar, and then I waited till closing time and I got the pimp herself coming out. I have never beaten anyone that badly, but this was a different level of fight and rage: she had won my trust and set me up to be gang-raped, and then she bragged about it.

It seems to me now I beat her with all the pain and fear and misery for all those people who had violated me and whom I could never catch. Rage for ever bottled and screwed up tight inside me, acts blacked out, or unremembered, but nevertheless still, for ever, there.

We were off the sidewalk, fighting between parked cars, down on the pavement, and I heard someone shout, “A bus is coming!” I kept hammering her when I heard the swish of the bus, the light gleam on the shiny nuts of the big duels passing two inches from my face. Then someone kicked me in the face and I was out cold. I never saw that woman or those men again.

Only men can rape and hurt you the way they do but, worse still, sometimes women help them.

Rape and fight, I guess they go together like blood and miscarriage. I found out the rape had made me pregnant when I lost the foetus after another beating, this time from the brother of a man Mom wanted me to live with. Calvin didn’t like anyone around, anyone to notice what he was doing while she was at work. When Perry came from Butte to live with us in Winnipeg, one of the first things he told me was he woke up to find Calvin peeking under his blankets; in no time Perry was gone, Mom gave him up to the Seven Oaks Home for troubled children. By age sixteen (1982), he was in Stony Mountain Prison for armed robbery; I don’t think he knew his great-great-grandfather Big Bear was in a small cell there in 1885. And I was on the street more than ever. I never told anyone about my miscarriage.