Born with a Tooth Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’s not happy.
    â€œCongratulations!” I say.
    She seems to know I mean it. “Thanks, ma’am.”
    â€œWhat you going to do with all that money?” I ask her.
    â€œFix my husband’s Ski-Doo and get myself a new rifle, I figure. Put the rest away.”
    She’s got almond eyes. She looks half Indian.
    â€œBefore you go making plans,” Roddy jumps in, “what about considering a donation to the council? You know we took a thumping in the wallet tonight to get interest up in a new casino. I’m not asking for all of it, miss, maybe $5,000. Think of it as an investment with guaranteed return. The new casino would consider you a very special guest. Always.”
    I don’t believe Roddy’s nerve. “Roddy!” I say.
    He shoots me a stare. “Follow or get out of the way,” he says.
    It’s late. I’ve got to get to the kids.
    As I near the door, the woman says, “Bingo’s as much as I can stand. I’m just really not much of a gambler. I ... I can’t imagine having luck like this again, and that’s the truth.”
    I’m going to get out of the way, then.
    I shut the Palace door behind me. There’s no moon and the wind blows along the pine tops. I hear the wind’s whisper. The stars are out bright. Finally to be in fresh air makes me laugh loud. I look up and say to the dog star, “ Aneen Anishnaabe . Hello, Indian.” It’s the star I told Little Ollie is his dad.

YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT JENNY TWO BEARS DID
    S ummer barrelled up from the Great Lakes and rolled across Georgian Bay. Its heat killed the blackflies, and when the mosquito droves replaced them in the first warm nights, the weekenders arrived in swarms from Toronto and Oshawa and Hamilton and the northern States.
    There was little Jenny could do about it. Weekenders meant business for the band along with the arrival of a handful of cute guys. Even a few old friends’ faces among the white hordes that crawled like freshly dug grubs over the Turtle Stone Reserve. The arrival of the tourists meant a busy night at the big show on Canada Day, for the other bands, anyway. Weekenders meant a packed beach of excited and drooling teenagers, escaped from the confines of the parents’ quaint summer cottages, grooving spastically. In the old days it had been Jenny’s very own loud and alive all-Indian-girl band playing on the stages of small clubs, screaming out the Native blues. Now it was slick white boys from the city up there on the Mosquito Beach stage, strumming insolently on guitars and acting like rock stars. It was time to realize that Sisters of the Black Bear were no longer in vogue.
    Maybe calling the weekenders grubs was a little harsh. But just today she had seen a sickly pale and blubbered woman in
    a sun hat trying to power a motorboat out of the marina, had watched in horror as she lost control and punched her bow into the hull of Jenny’s little Streamliner.
    Jenny tried hard to hold in her anger when she walked down to the office to register a complaint against Blubber Woman. When Mike, the supervising tribal cop on duty, filled out the report, he mentioned that he’d heard the council had chosen Sisters of the Black Bear to headline Mosquito Beach this year.
    â€œAre you sure they picked us?” Jenny asked.
    â€œOh yeah,” Mike answered. “Council said your new sound is great.”
    He congratulated her on her band’s comeback. Her anger rubbed away now, Jenny skipped back to the marina, thinking how silly it was for her, a woman who’d be thirty-two this autumn, to be happy as a teenager. Her band had finally found a little of its old glory. Oh, they had lived through a real heyday in the mid-eighties, one year even being voted Best Female Band in the punk rock category by an underground Toronto newspaper, but that was then. Now the Sisters were set to headline the biggest bash of the year.