Shawanigan Bingo Queen

by Joseph Boyden

Springtime brings the blackflies. Clouds of biting gnats that dig into your ears and nose and scalp swarm to the reservation in the first warm days to feed on us and keep us indoors for the four or five weeks that they eat and mate and die. You might not be able to see their teeth or even their little bodies crawling in your hair, but when blackflies start sucking, you know it. When I was a small girl I remember playing out back by the edge of the bush when a chain saw scream started up in my head and sent me wailing to my mother. I put my finger in my ear and pulled it away all bloody. My mother said, "Hush, Mary," and stuck the point of a rolled-up towel in and wiggled out three of the buggers. Then she took her bottle of rye and tipped my head sideways and poured some in. My first taste of whiskey came running down my cheek and mixed with blood that I licked off the side of my mouth.

Sometimes I think I fell in love with my husband Ollie because, no matter how bad the blackflies got in spring, he'd still go out and about, working on his old car or hunting in the bush. He didn't let a thing stop him. When we first married he'd get a bottle of American bourbon that had been smuggled from over the border and take me out in his little boat late at night to look at stars and get drunk and silly. He'd take his shirt off, even if it was early spring with a sheen of thin ice forming on the lake, and stand on the bow and say, "Look, Mary, that bright one there is the Dog Star. It's my lucky star. Me and him, that dog, we talk to one another." Then he'd howl out until his voice came bouncing back across the water, and I'd join in and yelp to his star and to the moon until we were both out of breath. We were young and crazy. When Ollie got killed, there was grumbling and rumours it wasn't an accident. Maybe it wasn't planned, some of the old ones said, but it wasn't no accident, either.

Then our Tribal Council brought the Bingo Palace to Shawanigan. The one road running out of the res got paved, and Chief Roddy Manague bought his Cadillac. The Bingo Palace changed a few things.

There are still blackflies in spring, and old Jacob the hunter still keeps our freezers full of deer meat in winter. What's changed now is we got a common focus on the res, something to look forward to most week nights. We got the Wasichu driving in with all their money, ready to spend it, sometimes driving all the way from Toronto. The Palace has given us a name.

Wasichu means white man. Grandmother never had the chance to teach me the Ojibway word, so I borrowed from the Sioux. Don't mistake me for a Plains woman, though. I'm a proud Ojibway, one of the Five Nations. The Sioux, when they came this far east, were our enemy, and we only feared and respected the Iroquois more. My grandmother spoke fluent Ojibway, but she's dead a long time ago. Before Ollie came along, I once learned some Indian from a South Dakota boy. He was Oglala Sioux and carried it proud like his barrel chest. Even though the words he taught me weren't my language, they were still Indian, and better than nothing, I figure. In return, I taught him to say the only Ojibway I knew, other than swear words. "Aniin Anishnabe" means "Hello, Indian" in my language. One of these days I'll take a break from the Palace and learn some Ojibway, something I can pass on to my two kids.

But what I can pass on to them now is my knowing bingo. I thought it was the stupidest game I ever heard of when word of the money started drifting in eleven years ago with Yankee Indians in big, new cars. Roddy Manague knew we were all down and out and there was no future for anyone collecting pogey and baby bonus cheques. Roddy was big enough to see that bingo might bring us some freedom.

You have to be a smooth talker to try to swing the elders into your favour, especially when you're selling something as foreign as gambling. In the end, it came down to the Council elders, the old women to decide. Roddy brought money backers in from an Upstate New York res, Iroquois with slick black hair in ponytails and three piece suits and eagle feathers. They carried charts with red lightning zigzags on them and slide projectors under their arms.

The Iroquois dazzled our squaws with talk of money for schools and self-autonomy. Well, we never got a school. Some built onto their houses, and many have newer cars. But you know there's still burnt-out war ponies with no windshields and most of the res has rotted plywood and tarpaper roofs. The biggest difference when you look around, though, is the Palace, on Centre Hill beside the rusting playground. The Palace is an old corrugated airplane hanger, insulated against winter and big enough to play a game of hockey inside with room for spectators. There's no bay windows to look out onto Killdeer lake. Just tables and chairs to sit 450 people and a high stage for me to call numbers from and eight TV monitors spaced along the walls to see what ball's being called.

It used to be that the inside was filled with card tables and folding chairs, so empty and drafty that it was ugly. I learned soon enough to judge how well we were doing by the changes that took place inside. After the first two years the cheap furniture was gone, replaced with sturdy pine cut from the bush. But the real measure is the walls. Roddy commissioned local kids to draw murals and paint pictures. Big colouful stuff showing Manitou and Indian princesses, the Sun Catcher with her buckskin arms stretched up welcoming another day, the Circle of Protecting Buffalo. One boy drew his red and black impression of a Jesuit being tortured by Iroquois. Roddy thought it would upset the Wasichus and made the boy alter it. Now on the wall behind the stage is a drawing of a Jesuit priest and an Indian warrior standing on a cloud shaking hands. Even though Ollie would have hated it, the Bingo Palace has become a nice-looking place over the last eight years.

Everyone is here to celebrate our eighth anniversary this weekend--cottagers up for the summer, townies, Indians. It's even larger than the Council expected, with the chance to win a $50,000 pot and tons of advertising in advance. The money we're offering tonight is unheard of around here. A bunch of people have already come up and asked if the flyers were a misprint. "$50,000!" Abe from North Bay says real loud in my ear. "Goddamn if I'd ever have to work another day in my life!"

This is the first chance Roddy's ever taken in terms of the house making it big or going bust. First the people have to come. The even bigger chance for us is whether or not somebody walks with the $50,000 pot, the final game of the night. I never seen Roddy so nervous before. I must admit I got my fingers crossed, toes too. If nobody walks with the jackpot, Roddy's plans for a full casino--blackjack, craps, roulette, you name it--can go into motion.

A Mohawk res out by Beaverton's already got a building going up with the same plan in mind. The Ontario politicians tried to stop them, and it was Wasichu courts that declared Native self-autonomy. Roddy's got that silver shovel in his closet, and he's ready to dig the first hole. After a big fight, Roddy got the Council to put up $25,000 when our New York Iroquois partners offered to help finance the casino deal. The Iroquois want to see if we can draw the crowds. It's now down to the money to bring in the bulldozers. Roddy told me he wants me to be a casino manager.

You couldn't have asked for a better day. The blackflies are gone for the season, so the clouds and little bit of rain's made the cottagers antsy to get out and about. We open the doors at three p.m. sharp and have a buffet of casseroles and macaroni and venison. Old Mary Lafluer from the tavern claims that when she walked from her place to the Palace, she counted 500 head, not including the little ones yelling and darting among the grownups.

Saturday nights were never like this seven years ago when I first got a job working bingo after Ollie died. Word of our Palace hadn't spread yet when Roddy hired me on at the snack counter. I worked my way up to official stage caller pretty quick, faster than I ever imagined. It's quite a thing to sit up above the crowd and pull balls from the air popper and hear the hush when you call. Tonight won't be much different. As six o'clock comes near it looks like every chair in the house is taken and people got their sheets of cards spread in front of them and are arranging all their doodads and charms.

You never seen such a strange sight--gnome dolls with bright pink or green hair shooting up from their heads, pieces of lucky clothing or real child hair and baby teeth. And daubers, lots of coloured bingo daubers. Most serious players always have a handful lined up, although it takes a lot of plugging away to run a dauber's ink dry. The stylish ladies carry all their bingo gear in crocheted bags. A few even have authentic-looking wampum pouches made from moose hide with beaded Indian scenes on them.

I notice that the teenagers form their own group along the far wall. They got torn jeans and long hair and pretty designs on their T-shirts. They're mostly res kids, Johnny Sandy, Suzanne Tibogonosh, and Earl Thibadeux among them. A few years ago, a lot of the more troublesome ones, the tricksters in the group, used to show up and do things like call "Bing..." and then "oh-oh" a few seconds later like they mistook winning a game. The older ones didn't like that, I tell you, white or Indian. Don't ever cross a player and her game. It's like spitting on someone's religion. The Indians never hushed up the trickster kids. It always seemed to be the old white ladies with thin lips making snake noises against their wrinkled fingers. Roddy finally chased the bad ones out. I don't know exactly what he did or said, and I'm not sure I want to know. But there isn't much trouble during the games anymore.

Tonight I notice a woman and her husband bring their three little ones in to sit with them while they get ready to play. My floor runner Albert goes over, and it looks like he's telling them that children aren't allowed in during the games. You never saw people leave in such a huff. I never seen the family in here before and don't expect to again anytime soon.

That's one of the disagreements my husband Ollie had with the Tribal Council so many years ago. Roddy tried to sell bingo as a business good for the whole community when Ollie started up his petition of names against it. Ollie knew there was no room for the res kids in the Palace. In the final Tribe vote, his big opposition speech ended with talking about our Rachel and Little Ollie. It made a stir with the older ones but the Palace was like a black bear waking in spring, too hungry to stop.

Ollie didn't live long enough to see bingo run on the res. He died when he fell out of a tree. He was way up, near the top of a big pine, sawing dead wood threatening to come down during the next thunderstorm. A cottager had offered him fifty bucks for the job. The cottager was an old man then, but seems much older now when I occasionally run into him at the trading post or in town. He still sends me a prayer card every year.

It's funny, you know. Even now I sometimes don't believe Ollie's gone. He was always falling out of trees or driving his snowmobile too late in spring and going through the thin ice or tearing the hull off his boat on a shoal at night. But he crawled back into our bed wet and cold or scratched up, telling me another story. After all these years it still doesn't sink in that nobody saw Ollie fall out of the tree or gasping for breath for half an hour with a branch through his stomach like the coroner told me. Ollie's luck ran out. I think the rumours are just Ollie's spirit flying around on the wind at night, stirring up trouble and rattling the pine branches.

There wasn't much time for mourning with Little Ollie and Rachel at home. Little Ollie remembers a few things about his daddy but Rachel was only two when it happened. That bothers me a lot, the fact they'll never know him.

Roddy knew I never liked the idea of living off government money, that I hated the idea as much as Ollie did. After the funeral Roddy offered me the job on the snack counter at the Palace. The thought of Ollie, looking down from his star and shaking his head disappointed that I sold myself out to something like bingo, bothered me. It always will. But it wasn't my fault that he left us early, and it seems to me that working is better than welfare. And I'm a hard worker. I moved up quick and ignored the grumbling from the others who worked the Palace till midnight and drank till dawn. Once I heard one of the townie kids call me Mary Goody Two Moccasins. I bitched him out good.

The Palace chatters like a forest full of grosbeaks when I walk up and take my seat by the popper, up on the stage a good four meters above the crowd. It's a bird's eye view through the haze of smoke rising up to the rafters. The noise stops with the croaking and fumbling of my mike, and you'd think a priest had walked in to say church or a judge to read the sentence. There are no empty seats. Even stragglers lean on walls or sit on the floor, arranging.

"Welcome to the Shawanigan Bingo Palace," I say. "As a lot of you know, Queen or King for the night wins ten dollars every time their ball number comes up in play this evening. Please refer to the lottery ticket you received with admission." I call out the number and wait for the winner. Old Barb from Magnetawan stands up and calls out, "I am Queen of the Shawanigan Bingo Palace!" Albert runs out and puts the red felt bandanna on her head. Old Barb looks very proud. People all around nod to her. It's a serious business. I make a note that her ball is "B-6." All Barb has to do is call out "Pay the Queen" whenever her number is announced in a game and Albert runs over and gives her ten bucks. It can add up.

I jump right into the Early Bird Special, with two games of straight bingo and two games of "Full Card X." It gets the interest up and people loosened for the night. I call the balls even and a little slow, holding them in front of the camera attached to the monitors long enough that the older ones who can't hear too well got enough time to squint out the numbers. I notice a lot of regulars in the audience tonight. There's Barb smiling away in her red bandanna and the Burk's Falls Lion's Club gang with their matching shirts. I notice that even the Judge came out tonight. I gave him up for dead a while ago. He's a retired lawyer from Toronto who moved up here alone. We call him "Judge" because he uses a dauber shaped like a gavel and pounds away all serious at his cards like he's ordering the court to silence. The Early Bird winners walk with or split $100 a game.

One hundred dollars seemed like a fortune to me back when Ollie and I married. He was never much on government handouts even though there were plenty of days we needed cash. Ollie was a wagon burner, for sure. He smelled out trouble and rolled in it faster than a hunting dog. He liked to piss people off. I met him at fifteen and could see it in his eyes. He'd hitchhiked into our res from the Quebec Interior and decided he liked the lake. So he stayed. But he could use a chain saw and drive a logging truck, so he wasn't much of a burden. Old Jacob took Ollie under his wing and taught him about fishing and hunting. Jacob is a legend around here. He feeds most of the res through the harder months. One winter Ollie and him bagged seventy deer and fed a lot of mouths through to spring.

Then Ollie got a crush on me. He claimed it was a vision he had after hiking to Moosejaw Mountain, which isn't so much a mountain as a heap of old quarry stone, and he got stuck there a couple days after his lunch bucket ran dry.

I'll never forget the day he walked back onto the reservation, shouting he was a man now, that he had his first true vision--one of a large brown animal whispering my name in his ear as he lay naked and sweating on a rock.

I laughed at Ollie from my doorstep, so he left, and I didn't see him again for two weeks. When he came back, his chest had swelled bigger. Ollie made sure to tell all my girlfriends that he had hitched the 500 miles up to Moose Factory in pursuit of his vision, knowing it would get straight back to me. I'll tell you now I didn't like the idea of a moose popping up in Ollie's head whenever he thought of me. We ended up marrying a year later.

After a game of "4 Corners" and a game of "Make a Kite," I call intermission. Tonight Jan What's-Her-Face comes and gabs in my ear like usual. She's a Wasichu cottager who wears "Free Leonard Peltier" or "American Indian Movement" T-shirts. Jan tells me that last night she had a vision in her dreams. The vision told her the winning combination of balls I would call in the jackpot game, and she looks forward to seeing if her vision was worthy.

"I always get such a feeling of freedom when I drive onto your reservation," she says and takes my arm in her hands. "Just imagine winning $50,000. That would be freedom too."

She's a summer cottager. Her place up here isn't even winterized. I wonder what she'd think about freedom, stuck in the house when it's thirty below and the walkie-talkie tells you the road won't be cleared for a few days.

Between the two intermissions we play "Block of Nine, Anywhere," "Half Diamond," and "Full Diamond" games. They're simple enough, but I see people's focus is on the cards. There's not much chitchat while play's in progress. The winnings are too big. Albert runs and hands out $2,000 in winnings before I call intermission again.

Bingo calling's like any other job in that it can get boring after a while. I learned to pass my time on the stage every night watching faces and goofing around, calling numbers too fast and laughing inside at all the eyes looking up at me like panicked raccoons in car headlights. Or I'll call real slow for a long while, listening for just the right moment when people are chatting and not paying attention. That's when I call a few balls super fast and listen for the angry wail of "call again" or "bad bingo." Ollie would have laughed at that.

But tonight there's no fooling around. Roddy paces the floor like an anxious bear, his black braided ponytail flopping almost to his bum.

Our "Shawanigan Special" tonight is the biggest ever. If you want to play, you have to buy special strips at $5 a pop, but the winner walks with a guaranteed $4,000. We have to sell 800 cards just to break even. Roddy decides to leave the cashier box open a couple of extra minutes despite cries of "Let's play" and "Get on." From where I sit, with all the scurrying about and money changing hands, we'll break even. But you're never positive until accounting's done at the end of the night.

Roddy comes up to me before I start play again. "Remind the crowd about the jackpot game tonight, Mary," he says. As if they need to be reminded. I clear my throat and switch on the mike.

"Let me just tell you about tonight's jackpot game." Everyone goes real quiet and stares up at me. "The game is included with your admission price. You can buy extra cards at $25 a pop. Jackpot game is fill your card in 40 calls or less and win $50,000. In 41 calls, $40,000. In 42 calls, 25,000. In 43 calls, $15,000. In 44 calls, $10,000. And in 45 calls or more, $5,000." I see the glow in people's eyes. It's an addiction.

"The point isn't to win, it's to win big!" Roddy tells the Palace workers at our meetings. "You either lead or follow or get out of the way." It's a good scare tactic, but doesn't leave much room to argue. I sometimes take a walk and look around the res and wonder.

I was out walking with Little Ollie and Rachel when I heard about Ollie. Jerry, the tribal police chief, roared up in a dust cloud. When he got out of his Bronco, he looked sad and red-eyed.

"I got bad news, Mary," he said. "Come here away from the little ones for a minute." I remember thanking him and walking the kids down the dirt road to the pond Ollie always took them to.

"Daddy can't take you fishing here no more," I said. "Or to school or out in the bush." Their deer eyes looked up at me. Little Ollie figured it out fast and ran away on his thin little legs, his sneakers slapping up puffs of dust on the road. Rachel cried and wanted her brother to come back.

Little Ollie isn't so little anymore. He's eleven now and blames Roddy but can't reason it out exactly why. I tell my boy that it was his father's time to go to Manitou, that he's up in the sky as a twinkling star now, looking down at us. The few rumours are just rumours. But my boy fights it. He's not named after his dad for nothing, I figure.

I start in the thirteenth game with one of my favourites, "Telephone Pole," where you got to fill in the right numbers to make the design on your card look like one. The next game, "Picnic Table," goes along the same lines. "Buy extra jackpot cards soon," I remind everyone. "Jackpot is five games away." I glance at my watch. Tonight's going to be a late one for sure. The kids are long asleep.

My mother watches the kids on bingo nights. She tries to refuse my money, but I pay for her time anyways.

"We take care of our own," she says to me. "We've always taken care of our own. We're Ojibway."

After Ollie died and I started working, Mom and me started fighting. One night I got out of work real late and she got mad when I went to pick up the kids. "Ollie wouldn't want you working there," she said. That got me mad. "He thought bingo wasn't Indian. It's a white man's game."

I knew that already. It got me madder. "Indian?" I said. "Indian? We're Ojibway and you don't even know our language." I tried to pass her to get the kids, but she stopped me and wrestled me to the ground by my hair. I began to cry and shouted, "Where were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?" She had me pinned beneath her, her cheeks shaking and her chest against mine.

"Where were all the Indians when Ollie fell out of a tree?" she asked. Our eyes got big at the same time. And then we started laughing at what I'd said until my sides were about to burst. We just lay beside one another on the floor and laughed. It felt good. We've been tight ever since.

I've asked Mom to come out and play bingo. "I'll find another sitter," I tell her. But she doesn't like the thought of a room packed with quiet, serious people and smoke.

"I could go to a sweat lodge if I want to see that," she always tells me. But I can see the question in her eyes, the one asking if it doesn't bother me to be working for something Ollie hated.

I don't think it bothers me.

Really, I don't.

Roddy puts the word out there're professional gamblers up from Toronto tonight.

"You just call those balls, Mary," he says. "You call `em during the last game and pray hard. I don't want to see you call out the big one tonight."

As if I got a say. If somebody wins, Roddy loses the Council money, not his backers'. That's the truth. If someone wins the big one tonight and I get blamed, I'll just laugh and tell him, "Ollie came to me in a dream and says `fuck you.'" I'll just walk.

"Next game is `Crazy H,'" I say. My voice is muffled by chatter and smoke. We play mostly tried-and-true bingo strategies here. Roddy's traveled as far as Montreal and Vancouver to keep up on the business. He wants a slick operation, only the best.

The "Bow Tie" and "Cloverleaf" games slow things down some but the "Inside Square" and "Outside Square" games go faster then I've ever seen. I've barely called twenty-five balls and both are won. There's so many cards out there tonight, house odds are way down.

When I call intermission before the big one, a line forms at the cashier box. The jackpot is actually three games in one. The best we can hope to do is fork out $7,000. A grand for the first person to get "One Line Anywhere," another grand for "Four Corners," and if we're real lucky, only $5,000 for the jackpot.

Most are already in their chairs when I call them to play. Every other person has a smoke lit. I start the big one, and I call fair and slow, leaving each ball on the monitor for seven seconds before calling the next.

The "One Line Anywhere" goes to a young woman in just eight balls. She calls "Bingo!" then squeaks like a chipmunk and begins giggling. Albert calls her numbers back to me. I wait a few seconds for effect before saying, "That's good bingo."

The judge calls "Bingo" calmly after clearing his throat. He got "Four Corners" in twelve balls. Roddy's pulling his hair out over in the corner. I've never seen people win so early. After Albert calls The Judge's numbers and I verify, and old Indian lady I don't recognize calls "Bingo" as well. The Judge frowns. Albert calls her numbers back. She made a mistake. The Judge smiles again.

Twenty-eight calls till we clear the first one. Roddy over-sold tonight. There's way too many cards out there. I call tons of "B's" and "N's" and "O's." When an "I" or a "G" comes up, people tense and search their cards hard. I call the thirty-second ball when I notice a woman eyeing the far monitor carefully. I call a "G." She doesn't budge. She's only got one game sheet in front of her, an amateur amount. But she's lucky tonight. It looks like all she needs is on or two "I's" to win, best I can see. That means there's got to be dozens of players on the edge of taking it. Ball number thirty-eight is an "I." I call and close my eyes. Nothing. Another "B" on the next call. People moan loud. I reach in the popper for the fourtieth ball. It doesn't feel right. I turn it over to reveal "I-28." I can feel Roddy's eyes on me. A couple of people squeal loud but then a wave of sad shouts rises up. I see Roddy smiling.

The next two balls are an "N" and a "G." Roddy's smiling bigger. The pot's now down to $15,000 when I pull another "G." People must be thinking the popper's rigged, so few I's" have come up. Just as I'm about to pull the ball for $10,000, a shaky voice calls out "Bingo" near the front door. She's a Down To The Wire Girl. She just won herself $15,000. Everybody's heads turn and voices rise in grunts and swear words and anger. Albert runs over to the unofficial winner.

I can see it's a young woman. She's thin and pretty. I like her long hair. Roddy heads over to help verify the numbers. I call out, "That's good bingo." People clap and some cheer. The young woman doesn't even smile. But I smile when Roddy pulls out the cheque book. It's nice to see a winner. I get up and stretch and head down to congratulate her.

You never seen a place empty faster than a bingo hall after the calling's done. There's a few of the woman's friends around smoking and talking to one another. Roddy holds her arm. Roddy's smiling, but He's not happy.

"Congratulations!" I say.

She seems to know I mean it. "Thanks, ma'am."

"What you going to do with all that money?" I ask her.

"Fix 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.

"Before 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 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. To finally be in fresh air makes me laugh loud. I look up and say to the Dog Star, "Aneen Anishnabe. Hello, Indian." It's the star I told Little Ollie is his dad.