John Tavare
Mamie listened to the news on the Christian radio station from Dryden. Oh, my dear Lord, she could not believe the news. Billy, beautiful Billy, who had been adopted by her evil next-door neighbors in the seventies, had escaped from the Kenora jail after he was somehow implicated in the death of a prison guard. Now Billy was a fugitive from justice, the Kenora police, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, police services across Canada. The newsreader on the local Christian radio station from Dryden, Ontario said a Canada-wide warrant had been issued for his apprehension and arrest. Police warned members of the public not to approach Billy, since he was considered armed and dangerous. Call 911, if Billy was identified, or spotted: do not try to approach or engage him, but Mamie knew these claims were wrong and outrageous.
Always concerned about his well-being, Mamie was Mama to Billy—her next-door neighbor when he was in his childhood adoptive years. Now Mamie expected roadblocks and police checkpoints along the route she drove, on the TransCanada highway, to Winnipeg, but, hardheaded, she steadfastly drove to her preordained destination in the city. Mamie had important personal business in Winnipeg: medical appointments with the cardiologist in the medical arts building downtown. Then she needed to attend important diagnostic tests at the Health Sciences Centre in their sprawling hospital complex in another part of the prairie city, which dismayed and astonished Mamie with its sprawling exurbs, suburbs, and wide streets, on which everyone seemed to drive a car and nobody walked. Her increased age and declining health meant she needed blood tests and X-Rays at the Health Sciences Centre; electrocardiograms and echocardiograms at the cardiology lab; and, a cardiac stress test on the treadmill where they would monitor the condition and functioning of her coronary arteries and her hoarse, raspy lungs. Her family physician warned her the cardiologist to which she was referred noted she might require a pacemaker inserted alongside her heart, if she couldn’t find anew medication that would smooth her heart rhythm.
Still, Mamie hoped she might encounter Billy enroute, somewhere along the road, so that she could help him. Somehow, she wanted to put the fear of Jesus in him, let him know that the Lord loved him, make him understand God would save his soul. Mamie thought she might give him some money, and possibly even persuade him to surrender and turn himself into the police. She knew he still loved her like the mother she tried to be to him.
Mamie had at times called his adoptive parents, her next-door neighbors, to complain about the way they treated him, but they, regular customers at her hairstyling and beauty salon, told her to mind her own business: Beneath her electric clippers and scissors, under her dome shaped hair dryers, over her fence, in the back alley, they threatened her, shouted, and argued and bickered with her. Meanwhile, his adoptive parents continued to beat him with the belt and broomstick, for some nonsense like not doing his chores on time, for not washing the dishes, scrubbing the toilets, and making beds properly.
Mamie’s heart broke when she saw Billy as a boy crying, sobbing, and raging alone in the backyard, kicking the truck tires, taking his anger and frustration out on the stack of firewood with an axe or hatchet. Mamie so hated to see that handsome boy crying in her next-door neighbor’s yard. Dear Lord, the corporal punishment Billy endured, the slaps, smacks, sobs, and crying she heard from him in the yard next-door, the beatings, beltings, spankings, with wooden spoons, boots, belts, brooms.
She would invite Billy into her house or the beauty salon, in a converted garage, for treats and snacks, including milk, hot chocolate and homemade cookies and treats, or she would serve him lunch or dinner. She even gave him his favorite foods, coffee and ice cream, even though she worried about their nutritional value. Ice cream was absolutely his favorite food. Mamie frequently invited him to dinner, but his adopted parents wouldn’t allow him to visit her, so he always went to her house and salon on the sly.
Mamie had even reported his beatings to the children’s aid society and the local family social services organization, but the pastor, at the evangelical church, whose rock star hair she cut and styled, warned her not to get involved. In any event, despite her warnings, social workers sat on their hands and did diddly-squat. The social workers, office workers with clipboards and official manners, government pencil pushers, told her it was none of her business, not their affair, not Mamie’s either, not their department, because his adoptive parents were white, and Billy was indigenous, Mamie concluded.
These so-called childcare workers didn’t care. Anyway, they were playing the social services and social workers’ game by the rule of the white man of Canada in the seventies. Mamie had even taken Billy on a trip to Winnipeg when she needed to shop for supplies for her beauty salon and had an appointment with her gynecologist. During that road trip to Winnipeg, so many years ago, Mamie also took him shopping in her pink Cadillac for winter clothes.
Now Mamie did her makeup and hair and headed off in her vintage pink Cadillac to Dryden on Highway 72. She stopped at the diner beside the convenience store of the Husky gas station, with the massive red-and-white Maple Leaf flag, for the truck driver’s special before she continued to drive west along the TransCanada Highway to Winnipeg. After she mopped up the drying egg yolk with her toast and drank her coffee, she strolled out to her Cadillac, in the parking lot crowded with transport trucks and delivery vehicles. She still felt hurt and vulnerable after two slips and falls on the icy sidewalk, when she took a walk downtown in her hometown to pick up the mail at the post office downtown. The injuries left her feeling like she had broken or cracked her ribs on her left side.
As she passed the fast-food restaurant in Dryden, she remembered how Billy loved their soft ice cream cones, how Billy practically survived on McDonalds and Dairy Queen soft ice cream cones when she took him on that memorable trip to Winnipeg to shop for winter clothing. Billy refused to eat anything else but those dairy desserts. Mamie decided that it wouldn’t hurt to get a takeout coffee and a washroom break, at the quick service restaurant, when she remembered how much he loved soft ice cream cones. She went to the ladies’ room of the establishment to straighten her hair and adjust her mascara, lipstick, and makeup.
When she returned to the service counter, instead of a coffee, she instinctively ordered a soft ice cream cone, even though she hadn’t eaten a cone in years and had no real craving for the creamy gooey sticky stuff. When she turned around, she literally bumped into Billy, wearing rumpled, soiled work clothes, looking rugged and tough, smelling of body odor. Billy recognized Mamie instantaneously, as she handed him the soft ice cream cone and reached out to embrace him. She gave him a warm, hearty hug, while he licked the white twirl of ice cream.
“Billy boy, the police are looking for you,” Mamie practically shouted. “You need to turn yourself in.”
“Please, Mama, could you keep your voice down.” Billy nervously looked and glanced around the restaurant, as customers lined up to order hamburgers and fries. Billy dove into a booth and she mildly hectored and remonstrated across the table with a leftover cheeseburger and poutine, until he interrupted, “Do you think you could give me a ride to Winnipeg?”
“Lord love you, Billy, that’s exactly where I’m headed. You know I love you Billy, and I’ll give you a ride to Winnipeg, but as soon as we arrive I want you to turn yourself into the police.”
“I will, Mama, but I want to surrender to the indigenous police, on my First Nations community. If you give me a ride as far as Winnipeg, I’ll be able to meet with an indigenous lawyer.”
“Indigenous! Boy, I wish you’d stop using the big fancy words of lawyers and reporters. They lie and cheat, pretend to care, and act all polite in the public and then piss on the common man when they’re sniffing wine in their exclusive bars and fancy restaurants. You’re an Indian, boy, a strong, red-blooded Indian, you got the looks and the strength of a warrior. You look like a fierce brave. You should be proud.”
Accustomed to her conservative, old school ways, Billy looked in her eyes and smiled wanly. “My lawyer in Winnipeg can advise me—tell me what to do.”
“Boy, are you trying to feed me stories? You always were good at feeding me lies, telling me it was okay to visit my house, when your parents expressly forbade, but you were always so endearing and entertaining I couldn’t do anything but forgive you.”
“I can catch a ride with my friends in a truck back to the reserve in Lac Seul after I take care of business in The Peg.”
“What kind of business do you have to take care of in Winnipeg?”
“I need to meet with my friends and get advice from my lawyer.”
“All right, son, sounds like you’re running around in circles and haven’t made up your mind yet. Next thing you know you’ll be telling me you’re headed west to Edmonton to work in the oilfields. But you need to surrender to the authorities. You know I love you, boy. You know Jesus loves you. I love you like a son, but we’ve lost touch with each other over these many long years. I heard the odd rumor about you from time to time in my hair salon, but that was before my stroke. I didn’t hear any real news until Dryden radio told me about your jailbreak yesterday morning. Now you’re in real big trouble, and there’s only so much that I can do to help.”
“I understand.”
“I’ve so many fond memories of you, boy. The way you used to sing, like a Motown artist, snapping your fingers, making dance moves like The Temptations, crooning my favorite songs like ‘My Girl.’ I thought with your singing and dancing you were bound to be famous someday.”
“I think school suspensions and detentions killed whatever urge I had to sing then.”
“Nobody wanted to help a native boy then. I remember when I took you on that trip to Winnipeg all you wanted to eat the whole time was soft ice cream cones. At night in the hotel room when I insisted you take a bath because you smelled so musky you finally gave up fighting me.”
“Mama, anybody who isn’t doused in cologne or perfume smells bad to you.”
“I’ve a lady’s refined and sensitive sense of smell. I don’t think your adopted had you washed for weeks. You took a bath in the hotel room shower, and I didn’t want to see you in the swimsuit the Lord gave you, but you still sang your Motown songs in the nude and played your weenie like a guitar.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Some things you can’t forget, son, some things you can’t unsee. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life. I thought I cracked my ribs laughing so hard.”
In a sultry mood, sitting in the silence of the red plastic booth, Billy finished licking his ice cream cone, while she admired her strong muscular man, with gothic tattoos on his neck, sitting across from her. She continued to watch her grown man licking his ice cream, who, disconcerted by her direct looks and unrelenting gaze, looked away. He slowly consumed the cool dairy dessert, savoring the taste, luxuriating in the soothing flavor.
Mamie lost track of him after his first year of high school, when he was moved from her neighbor’s house to a new foster home. She thought she might have adopted him herself, but, the social workers said, she was ineligible. The social worker had severe reservations she left unmentioned about the petite woman, a spinster, she noted dismissively. Besides, Mamie possessed a criminal record because of Billy, she said, after she found herself immersed in several heated arguments with Billy’s adoptive mother. The police charged her with assault after she accidentally-on-purpose drove her Cadillac’s front tire over Billy’s adoptive father’s foot. She believed the judge dismissed, suspended, or withdrew the charges—she couldn’t remember exactly. Anyway, the social worker said Mamie was an unsuitable woman for an Indian boy. Meanwhile, Billy was sent to the residential school at Pelican Falls.
“You know, there’s bound to be roadblocks set up back in Kenora. I’m not even certain why you want to go back that way.”
“I made a mistake accepting the first ride I got offered. My friend in Thunder Bay backed out; he’s on probation and then he discovered the trouble I was in.”
“He doesn’t want to risk his future. He’s native, isn’t he, son?”
“Yes, he’s indigenous, indeed.”
“Son, you know the justice system is never easy on you people. He made a wise choice. He needs to think about his own future, too, and getting back on the right track, like you.”
“Are you sure you want to help, Mama? Aiding and abetting a fugitive—that can be a serious crime.”
“Oh, I’d do anything for you, Billy. I’m not aiding and abetting anyone—just lending a helping hand, giving a ride to an old dear long lost friend, a family friend. I feel like you’re practically my son, but I’m trying to help you so you’ll turn yourself around and help your own people. At least here in Canada, they’ll give you a second chance, not like in the United States where they’ll lock you up in prison forever.”
Despite the fact she thought it was risky and Billy might be spotted and identified, she drove through downtown Dryden, across the river and dam from the massive pulp and paper mill, to the drugstore to buy razors and shaving cream and soap. She insisted Billy clean up and look presentable, in the washroom of the Husky service station, where the truckers parked their big rigs and sometimes hunkered down in their furnished cabs for the night. In the adjacent restaurant, they ate platters of French fries with gravy and roast beef and cheeseburgers with bacon and tall glasses of cola and orange soda. Then she drove back to the Walmart to buy him a fresh clean set of clothes. Afterwards, pleased with the preliminary results, Mamie took him to Rosie, her friend and favorite hairstylist, in Dryden for a haircut. She even managed to persuade him to allow Rosie to cut his long-braided ponytails. With Mamie’s encouragement, Rosie went so far as to give him a crewcut, which made him look like a freshly recruited Marine in bootcamp.
Mamie said she wanted Billy to look clean and presentable, like a white man. Impatient, high-strung, Billy winced, but he knew that Mama, old school, meant well. So far Mama was the only person willing to help. With the makeover, he might elude the authorities and detection by police. He got into the passenger seat, before Mama started her pink Cadillac west along the TransCanada highway. As she drove along the highway, she told him how she loved him like a son when he was a boy. She particularly appreciated when, having driven him to his home reserve in Lac Seul, he sang the native songs in Oji-Cree and Ojibway, beat the drums, and danced in his traditional and ceremonial dress for the powwow. It moved her to see him singing
and stamping his feet, in traditional aboriginal dance, with the thundering drums, head feathers, and moccasins: it aroused her to heights of passion, emotion, and tears.
As they drove along the narrow winding highway, through the treacherous Canadian Shield, an ethereal fog shrouded the roadway and the forests on either side. They realized the forest fire season, along with a spring fog, was upon them with a vengeance. When they arrived in Vermilion Bay, they stopped for takeout coffee. When they returned to the Cadillac, Billy ordered her to the passenger side and managed to convince her he should drive because she simply wasn’t driving fast enough.
Billy also worried about her pink Cadillac attracting attention. A pink Cadillac wasn’t exactly a car begging to be ignored. Mamie chortled and scoffed: What kind of car did he expect a former hairstylist and beauty salon owner, who looked after her precious things and property, to drive? Mamie demanded. As he continued to drive, Mamie told him she had the car painted pink years ago after she collided with a bull moose on the highway. The auto body repairman couldn’t be paid by cheque because his bank accounts were frozen by the revenue agency after he became delinquent on his goods and services taxes. After the autobody man jokingly told her pink was the cheapest color of paint, Mamie said why not and offered him three years’ worth of haircuts if he painted her Cadillac pink. Then, when he tried to dissuade her from painting the Cadillac pink, Mamie insisted. She even became adamant and stubborn and headstrong when her favorite auto body repairman, who also moonlighted as a mechanic, started to argue with her, which caused her to barter and bargain harder, costing him a year of free haircuts. Anyway, driving fast, Mama said, wasn’t exactly asking not to be pulled over.
But you’re driving too slow, Billy complained, and they might pull you over for that reason. Besides, he didn’t want her to get in trouble if they were stopped by the police and they recognized her and gave chase. Mama grudgingly agreed. While she sipped her coffee, which substituted for her chain smoking, she played gospel music from a mixed tape on her cassette deck. He asked her why she was always talking about God and Jesus now; Billy didn’t remember her speaking about religion when he lived with adoptive parents next door years ago. In fact, Billy remembered, when he dropped by the house and her home business, she loved to gossip about the neighbors and private affairs of her beauty salon clients. Mamie revealed to him several years ago she suffered a stroke after decades of heavy cigarette and chain smoking. Billy remembered how Mamie was a chain smoker, always with a smoldering long Virginia Slims cigarette in her hand. Now, instead she sipped tepid tea or weak coffee. After the ischemic stroke, she became aphasic, lost her powers of speech, and she could barely think straight. In the hospital, while she was recovering, she prayed to the lord God, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary, which she barely remembered from Sacred Heart Catholic school. She begged the Lord for forgiveness for the sins she may have committed and whatever wrong she may have done in life. If he restored her to health, she would become a better woman. She would devote part of her life to charity, prayer, and Jesus Christ. Her prayers were granted, and she gradually recovered her intellectual abilities and her speech.
As Billy drove along the TransCanada Highway, the winding twisting two lanes through the Canadian Shield, which took the lives of many motorists, he asked her whatever became of his original adoptive parents. Mamie said they broke up and moved—it was a long and sordid story with allegations of sexual impropriety, a native girl groomed in her teens, a young woman barely the age of majority, and criminal charges of embezzlement against his former adopted mother, after allegations from the social services organization that employed her.
When they reached a rest stop, with picnic tables, outhouses, and a panoramic view of a lake, Mamie started to ask why he originally headed deeper into Northwestern Ontario instead of heading west to Manitoba and a potentially easier route to freedom beyond. There the prison guard was killed. Billy tried to explain the death of the jail guard was completely accidental after a scuffle, over hot dogs, ketchup, and Cheez Whiz, broke into a riot, for which he was only a bystander. After his jail break, he said, he took the first ride offered, eastwards, as he hitchhiked on the TransCanada highway.
Mamie told him not to worry, but now that he was cleaned up, looking like a white man, she thought he was certain to be able to pass through the security cordon, assuming the police set up a roadblock, which they agreed seemed likely.
They drove along the TransCanada highway without any stops or pullovers, albeit their progress was slowed by drifting haze, fog, and smoke, which, the weather report on the Christian radio station from Dryden indicated, was a forest fire burning out of control, after it started earlier in the week from an overnight lightning strike on the tinder dry forests. The thick smoke slowed down the sparse traffic considerably, and Mamie thought it was an ominous sign. When they drove over a hill and the forest fires loomed over the ridges and hills in the distance, beyond a long narrow lake, Billy nodded agreement with Mamie, who expressed surprise authorities hadn’t closed the highway.
Several times, she feared, his fast driving would cause them to collide head-on with transport trucks as he drove dangerously fast, speeding swiftly along in the low visibility, through banks of late spring fog and the clouds of white smoke from the growing, spreading forest fire. Then they arrived at an intersection on the TransCanada Highway, where police had set up a roadblock. Mamie felt nervous when she saw the large number of police, with body armor and rifles, positioned on each side of the road.
When the police officers inquired, Billy told them he was Mamie’s patient escort, trying to make certain she arrived at her medical and lab appointments on time. They passed through a second roadblock further west along Highway 17, where an armored car filled with dore gold bars from the Red Lake gold mines and refinery smelter, had rolled over into a ditch, at the turn off to Red Lake Road. After a few questions, Billy told the police officer he was taking his mother to a medical appointment in Winnipeg. Pressed about his departure point, he mentioned casually they were from Sioux Lookout, which made the police officer suspicious. When Mamie mentioned she was Billy’s adoptive mother and he was escorting her to her cardiologist appointment, in Winnipeg, the officer, who wore a balaclava, waved them through.
Then, after a second officer signaled them ahead through the roadblock on the other side, another officer thought he recognized Billy. The police started to chase the couple at high speed in their cruisers, sirens wailing, lights flashing. When Mamie heard the sirens, she ordered him to stop her precious pink Cadillac, which she had owned for decades and treated like a baby.
An American collector of vintage cars, who had seen a local picture of her luxury car on a blogger’s post, shared on social media, on the Internet, offered her a hundred thousand dollars American for the car. He was prepared to fly to Canada to buy her Cadillac, but Mamie loved her car more than any baby she never bore and treated the Cadillac like a work of art.
Billy reassured her he knew the backroads and logging roads in the area and could outrun the police. But Mamie feared he would wreck her pink Cadillac or get the vehicle shot up by police bullets. Mamie ordered Billy to stop, and he followed her instructions. The police cut them off from the front and, through a megaphone, an officer shouted, “Stop!”
Mamie again ordered Billy to give up—he needed to surrender.
Billy replied, “Mama, I think you’re right.”
Through an electronic megaphone, the police shouted commands for him to get out of the car with his hands raised. They urgently ordered him to drop his weapons. Mamie was shocked and gasped when he reached into his belt and gingerly pulled out a sharp hunting knife with a large blade. He dropped the knife on the pavement through the driver’s side open window. He slowly and tentatively emerged from the driver’s seat of the car with his hands raised, as he stepped in front of the vehicle, in the beam of the headlights, filtered by the white haze of smoke and fog. He stood in front of Mama’s pink Cadillac, a car in perfect condition, with his hands raised. He was ordered to kneel on the pavement with his hands clasped behind his head and then to lie down flat on the ground. Through the drifting smoke, Mamie could see the hatred and anger, the hostility, the hateful expressions, in the eyes, grimaces, and faces of the police with their sidearms, sniper’s rifles, assault weapons, and shotguns. She feared they would shoot him with unrelenting gunfire. She even had a vision of them both, escorted by angels, rising from the pavement where they had been gunned down by the police, and ushered into heaven, carried into the bosom of the Lord.
“Oh, Billy boy, Lord save you. I’m coming to help. Mama will save you.”
“Mama, do what the police tell you! Stay where you are or you’ll get us both shot.”
The police officer with the megaphone again commanded Mamie to remain in the passenger seat with her hands visible. Despite her heart condition, her rheumatoid arthritis, and the fact her ribs still hurt from a recent slip and fall on the spring ice, she kicked open the passenger door and raced across the pavement, with open arms for Jesus and Billy. As she opened her hands and raised her palms upwards towards the heavens, Mamie pleaded for forgiveness, mercy, and deliverance. With her hands in a gesture of supplication, upstretched towards the heavens, shrouded by haze and drifting smoke from the forest fire, and her eyes clenched tight, she looked skywards towards the Lord. She believed God was manifest in the forms of the police officers and wanted to lay her hands on them to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. She began to babble a divine language comprehensible to nobody including herself. A Pentecostal officer noted the glossolalia, which he previously saw only in church assembly:
Mamie seemed ecstatic, blissful, as she spoke in tongues and tried to lay her hands on the officer nearest her to fill herself with the Holy Ghost. A hailstorm of bullets exploded from the muzzle of a semi-automatic assault rifle, knocking Mamie to the ground, where blood dripped from her bullet wounds and accumulated in a pool, trickling over the yellow median lies painted on the black asphalt, where she collapsed in surrender to the forces of nature.