For Joshua by Richard Wagamese Read Free Book Online Page B

clung to me, and the more interest she showed the more esteem I garnered at school. With the respect came a hunger for more, and the bigger and more fantastic the lies became.
    I can almost laugh when I recall that performance. Almost. As I gazed upwards at the stars that night in the foothills I remembered the collapse. Lori had kept on reading about Native life while we were together and she began to detect wide variations between what I was telling her and what the books were saying and showing. I was showing her how to do a war dance and explaining the meaning of war drums to her when she’d finally had enough.
    “There’s no war drum. There’s just a drum and it’s used for many things—not just war. If you were really Indian you’d know that. But you’re no Indian,” I recall her saying. “You’re nothing but a phoney.”
    She dropped me. Word spread just as quickly this time and I remember the shame and embarrassment I felt walking down the hallway to jeers and laughter. “Big Chief Full-of-Shit” was scrawled across my locker and I was alone again. All of the life I’d felt flowing through me when I was with Lori was gone and in its place was bitterness, shame, and an anger I’d never felt before. I was angry that no one, neither the Tacknyks nor the Gilkinsons, had allowed me to learnanything about who I was. They’d never allowed me to learn about my tribe, my history or culture. I knew then, in the loss of Lori, that I was no one, that all the play-acting I did was just that, that I was a non-entity because I didn’t know who I was. I heard the same familiar words in my head one more time. “There’s something wrong with you. If you were lovable, worthy, wanted, adequate, she’d have kept you. But you’re not, she found out, and now you’re alone.”
    Not much changed after that. I lied even more at home, school, and church, and when I was found out in those lies I was punished, banished, or rejected outright. With each reaction I became more determined to be seen, known, recognized. I skipped classes and hung out in pool halls. And I ran away from home. I ran away because even then I thought that geography was a cure. The first time I fled it was just for one night, which I spent huddled in the cab of a parked truck outside of Vineland, Ontario. It was miserable, cramped, and cold, and I actually looked forward to going back to my warm bed.
    The second time I ran away, no one even knew. The Gilkinsons were away for the weekend and as soon as they were gone I took off for Toronto. I was there for two days, hanging out on the Yonge Street strip and sleeping on the couch of someone’s “pad.” I mooched enough to get a busticket back home, and was there clean and waiting when my parents arrived.
    When I was fifteen I had my longest run yet. I’d been putting money in the bank from a paper route I had, and I had saved more than three hundred dollars when I took off in February. I caught a bus to Miami Beach, where I found myself in the company of three old hippies who smoked dope and hung out on the beach. I loved that. There was a laid-back feeling to that lifestyle and I allowed myself to unwind from all the stress I’d created at home. For a while I worked as a busboy in a cafeteria but was let go when I couldn’t provide a U.S. Social Security Number. The money I earned was squandered on pot for my friends, movies, and lunches on the beach. I thought I would never leave. But when my new-found friends discovered I was only fifteen and a runaway, they contacted the Gilkinsons and I was flown home.
    Life was horrible after that. During the weeks I’d been gone I’d got a big taste of what the world was like. I’d got a sense of the freedom that was out there, and this knowledge made me eager to escape. I couldn’t tell anyone about the putdowns I endured at high school. The words were suddenly harsher, more explicitly threatening. In the early 1970s, rock and roll was king and the youth