Motorcycles & Sweetgrass Read Online Free Page B

soup.’”
    “What does that mean?”
    Dakota shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s a Jewish joke or something, ’cause he’s Jewish.”
    Virgil picked the bowl up and began to slurp away, his spoon spilling more than it carried to his mouth.
    “Did Aunt Julia bring this?” he asked.
    “Yep, a whole big pot. How did you know?”
    Virgil shrugged. “She always puts too much salt in it.”
    Dakota slurped her soup too, seeming to enjoy the salty flavour. She paused long enough to say, “Yeah, but you’re eating it. And it’s supposed to be salty.”
    The two ate in silence for a while, watching the activities in the house through the large plate of glass like it was a huge television with the sound turned down.
    “Are you gonna go in and see her?” asked Dakota.
    “Grandma? I wanna but…”
    “But you’re kinda scared. Right?”
    Virgil nodded and went back to his soup. He
was
scared. He’d never seen anybody real sick and close to death before, and even though this was his grandmother, he wasn’t sure if he was up to it. His father’s casket had been closed.
    “I was too. She’s okay. Smiled, and even told me a joke.”
    They both smiled, remembering Lillian Benojee’s silly jokes.
    “The one about Native vegetarians?”
    Dakota nodded. “Yep, that one. Heard it a dozen times but she still makes me laugh.” She put her now-empty bowl down on the table and got comfortable in the deck chair. “Haven’t seen your mother here today. She coming?”
    For the second time, Virgil shrugged. “Don’t know. Band Office business, as usual. Said she’d try, but who knows.”
    To Virgil, “Band Office business” was a four-letter word. Last week it was a meeting of chiefs in Halifax, tomorrow it would be a conference with the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Ottawa, and next week something about those negotiations with local municipal governments over that boring land thing. It was always something, and usually it had nothing to do with him. He was a latch-key kid with no latch. Or key, as most homes in the village were kept unlocked.
    “I’m bored,” he said in a monotone voice as he fit his empty plastic bowl neatly into Dakota’s.
    Somewhere far to the south, other people were bored too. On the side of a lonely country highway north of a great lake and south of the Canadian Shield, Bruce Scott sat patiently, surrounded by his economic bread-and-butter: about a half-dozen handmade birdfeeders and bird baths. His car was neatly parked on a little driveway entrance to a field. He’d been here every weekend, and a few days midweek when the weather permitted, for the past month, same as with the year before. His wife made the feeders and baths, and she couldn’t find anybody else to sell them, so he did this himself, half out of love and half out of necessity. Bruce would sit there in a lawn chair for about eight hours or so at a stretch, reading book after book, listening to his oldies radiostation, generally feeling at peace with the world. On a good weekend he’d sell maybe three, making a cool tax-free ninety dollars.
    It was a hot day, for May, and though he wore a hat and sometimes brought a large umbrella for shade, he was tanned a nice dark roast-turkey brown, which was odd for somebody of Scottish descent. Today was no different than yesterday, or the day before. Around him, the spring insects buzzed the way they only buzz on really hot days. Bruce took his final Diet Pepsi from the cooler and opened it, enjoying the satisfying hiss of released carbonated air. Holding its cool surface to his forehead, he gazed down the road. About two hundred kilometres in that southerly direction was the big city. That’s where all the tourists came from—good or bad. On a day like this, all their windows would be rolled up, air conditioning going strong, and they’d be reluctant to pull over and exit the artificial environment of their cars into this sweltering atmosphere.
    The pavement