One in Every Crowd (4 page)

THE AIR SHIMMERED AND TWISTED where it met the earth. The road beneath the tires of my bike was a ribbon of dust, hard-packed and hot, a backroad race-track, and I was gaining on him.

His BMX was kicking up a cloud of pretend motorcycle smoke. I smiled and pedalled through it, teeth grinding grit and lungs burning, because the stakes were so high.

If I won, I was faster, until next time, than my Uncle Jimmy. And if he lost, he was slower, until next time, than a girl.

Is the little brother of the woman who married your father’s brother related to you? I called him my Uncle Jimmy, regardless, and he was my hero.

He was four years older and almost a foot taller than me, and I don’t think I ever did beat him in a bicycle race, but the threat was always there.

Just allowing a girl into the race in the first place raises the possibility that one might be beaten by a girl, so the whole situation was risky to begin with. We all knew this, and I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to tag along as much as I did had I been older, or taller, or a slightly faster pedaller.

Girls complicate everything, you see, even a girl like me, who wasn’t like most; you can’t just pee anywhere in front of them, for instance, or let them see your bum under any circumstance, or your tears.

There were other considerations, too, precautions to be taken, rules to be observed when girls were around, some that I wasn’t even privy to, because I was, after all, a girl myself.

It was the summer I turned six years old, and I was only beginning to see what trouble girls really were.

But I, it was allowed by most,
was
different, and could be trusted by Jimmy and his friends with certain classified knowledge. I was a good goalie and had my own jackknife, and could, on rare occasions, come in quite handy.

Like that day. That day I had a reason to tag along. I had been given a job to do, a job vital to the mission.

The mission was to kiss the twins. For Jimmy and his skinny friend Grant to kiss the twins.

The twins were eleven, and blonde, and from outside. Being from outside was a catch-all term used by people from the Yukon to describe people who were not from the Yukon, as in:

Well, you know how she’s from outside and all, and always thought she was better than the rest of us
, or,
I couldn’t
get the part and had to send it outside to get fixed, cost me a mint
, or,
well, he went outside that one winter and came back with his ear pierced, and I’ve wondered about him ever since
.

The twins were only there for the summer. Their dad was there to oversee the reopening of the copper mine. They wore matching everything, and also had a little sister, who was seven.

That’s where I came in.

The plan was a simple man’s plan, in essence. As we worked out the details, we all stood straddling our bikes in a circle at the end of Black Street where the power line cut up the side of the clay cliffs.

We were all going to pedal over to where the twins and their little sister lived. We had already hidden the supplies in the alley behind their house. The supplies consisted of a small piece of plywood and a short piece of four-by-four fence post.

We would take the plywood and prop one end of it up with the four-by-four (Jimmy and I had two uncles who were carpenters, and he would himself go on to become a plumber) and build a jump for our bikes. Then we would ride and jump off it, right in front of the twins’ house, which was conveniently located right across from the park (good cover). This would enchant the unsuspecting kissees-to-be (and most likely their little sister), drawing them out from their house and into the street, where they would be easier to kiss.

We would then gallantly offer the girls a ride on the handlebars of our bikes, having just proven our proficiency with bike trick skills by landing any number of cool jumps. The girls would get on our handlebars, and Jimmy and Grant would ride left down the alley with the twins, and I would take a right with their little sister and keep her occupied while they carried out the rest of the mission. The kiss-the-twins mission.

The only person more likely to tell on us than the girls, after all, was their little sister, and I had it covered. Keep her occupied. Don’t tell her the plan. Don’t wipe out and rip the knees out of her tights. Drive her around the block a couple of times, and drop her off. Grant and Jimmy would take care of the rest.

We thought we had pretty much everything covered. We even had secondary strategies; if the jump didn’t work right away, we could always make it higher, and if that didn’t work, I could bravely lie on the ground right in front of it, and they could jump over me.

It was a good plan, and it worked.

What we hadn’t foreseen was, I guess, unforeseeable to us at the time. The girl factor, that is.

How could we have known that the twins’ little sister would think that I was a boy?

And how had the girls already found out that Jimmy and Grant wanted to kiss them?

And what was I supposed to do if this girl, who was one year older than I was, slid off my handlebars as soon as we rounded the corner into the alley, planted both of her buckle-up shoes in the dust and both her hands on her hips, wanting me to kiss her like my uncle was kissing her older sister?

It hadn’t crossed our minds, but that is exactly what she did (and I can’t remember her name to this day, and so can’t make one up, because this is a true story): the twins’ little sister wanted me to kiss her, and I’m sure I must’ve wanted to oblige her, if only for the sake of the mission. Because that is the first most secret, sacred tomboy rule: never chicken out of the mission.

There was only one problem. The girl problem. She didn’t know I was one.

It wasn’t that I had deliberately misled her, it just hadn’t really come up yet.

And since me kissing anyone was never part of the plan as I knew it, I had not given much thought to the girl factor. But this girl had a plan of her own.

There she was, all puckered up and expectant-like, and it seemed to me I had a full-blown situation on my six-year-old hands.

A mistake had been made, somewhere, by someone. But what was it?

I had a number of options at that point, I guess.

I could have put my left hand on the back of her yellow dress, my right hand over her smaller left one, and given her a long, slow …

No, I would have dropped my bike.

I could have leaned awkwardly over my handlebars and given her a short, sloppy one, and just hoped for the best, hoped that there wasn’t something about kissing a girl the boys couldn’t tell me, any slip that might reveal my true identity.

I might even have gotten away with it. Who knows? I would have liked for this story to have ended that way.

But it didn’t. And because this is a true story, I would like to tell you what really went down with me and the twins’ little sister in an alley by the clay cliffs the summer I turned six.

But I don’t remember.

What I do recall was that unexplainable complications had arisen because we did not take the girl factor into consideration, rendering this mission impossible for me to carry out.

According to Grant and Jimmy, the little sister started to cry when the dust had cleared and she found herself alone, in an alley, in this weird little town where her dad made her come for the summer, and the twins had to take her home.

And when all three left, two weeks later, unkissed, Grant and Jimmy still considered me a major security risk.

But I don’t remember my retreat.

My Aunt Norah was seventeen, and babysitting us that day. She said I came flying up the driveway, dumped my bike on her lawn, streaked past her into the living room, and threw myself on the couch, sobbing incoherently.

I would like to think that at this point she patted my head, or hugged me, or something, to calm me down, but we weren’t really that kind of a family. It’s not like I was bleeding or anything.

She said that when I finally calmed down enough for her to ask me what was wrong, all I could say was three words, over and over.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Girls. We can be so complicated.

Webster’s New School
and Office Dictionary
defines a hero as a man of distinguished courage, moral or physical; or the chief character in a play, novel, or poem.

Her name was Cathy Bulahouski, and she was, among other things, my Uncle John’s girlfriend. She had other titles, too—my family is fond of nicknames and in-jokes—she was also referred to as the girl with the large glands, and later, when she left John and he had to pay her for half of the house they had built together, she became and was remembered by the men as “lump sum.” The women just smiled, and always called her Cathy.

Cathy Bulahouski, the Polish cowgirl from Calgary. I’ve wanted to tell this story for years, but never have, because I couldn’t think of a better name for a Polish cowgirl from Calgary than Cathy Bulahouski.

I remember sitting in her and John’s half-built kitchen, the smell of sawdust all around us, watching her brush her hair. Her hair was light brown and not quite straight, and she usually wore it in a tight braid that hung like a whip between her shoulder blades. When she shook the braid out at night, her hair cascaded in shining ripples right down her back to just past the dips behind her knees.

She would get John to brush it out for her, she sitting at one end of a plain wooden table, he standing behind her on their unpainted plywood floor. I would be mesmerized, watching her stretch her head back, showing the tendons in her neck. Brushing hair seemed like a girl-type activity to me, but John would stroke her hair first with the brush, then smooth it with his other hand, like a pro. My father rarely touched my mother in front of me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this commonplace intimacy passing between them.

The summer I turned eleven, Cathy was working as a short-order cook at a lodge next to some hot springs. She was also the horse lady. She hired me to help her run a little trail ride operation for the tourists. My duties included feeding, brushing, and saddling up the eight or so horses we had. And the shoveling of shit. I wasn’t paid any cash money, but I got to eat for free in the diner, and I got to ride Little Chief, half-Appaloosa and half-Shetland pony, silver grey with a spotted ass. Cathy and I were co-workers and conspirators. Every time we got an obnoxious American guy she would wink at me over his shoulder while he drawled on about his riding days in Texas or Montana, and I would saddle up Steamboat for him, a giant jet black stallion who was famous both for his frightening bursts of uncontrollable galloping and for trying to rub his rider off by scraping his sides up against the spindly lodge-pole pines the trails were lined with.

I always rode behind my aunt; Little Chief was trained to follow her horse. Hers would plod along at tourist speed in front of me, and I would try to make my legs copy the way hers moved, the seamless satin groove her hips fell into with every swing of the horse’s step.

Sometimes we would ride alone and she would whistle and kick the insides of her boots in and race ahead of me. Little Chief would pick up the pace a bit like the foot soldier he was, and my heart would begin to pound. Cathy would ride for a while and then whirl her horse around, her long braid swinging, then hanging down her front as she rode back towards me.

One day we were lazily loping alongside the little road that led back to the hot springs when one of Cathy’s admirers came up from behind in a pick-up. He honked hello as he and his road-dust drove by, which spooked Little Chief and he bucked me off.

On impact, tears and snot and all the air in my lungs were expelled. I lay on the hard-packed dirt and dry grass for a minute, bawling when I could catch little pieces of my breath.

“Get on,” Cathy said, hard-lipped as she rode up beside me. “Get back up on that horse right now. Do it now or you’ll be too afraid later.”

She was tough like that.

One Christmas Eve shortly after she and John had finished drywalling, our family all had turkey dinner out at their place. We were each allowed to open one present, and my mom had suggested I bring the one shaped just like a brand new toboggan from under our tree at home.

The coolest thing about Cathy was how she would gear up in a snowsuit in thirty below in the blue-black sky of a Yukon night (which begins at about two in the afternoon around solstice) and go play outside with the rest of the kids. Not in a grown-up, sit-on-the-porch-and-smoke-cigarettes-and-watch kind of way, but in a dirty-kneed, get-roadrash-kid kind of a way. Right after I ripped the last of the wrapping paper off my gleaming red sled, she was searching through the sea of snowboots by the door for her black Sorels and pulling her jacket off the hook behind the door.

“Let’s go up the hill behind the house and give it a try. Not much of a trail in winter, but we’ll make one.”

I suited up right behind her, followed by my sister and a stream of cousins with mittens on strings.

It was so cold outside that the air burned arrows into the backs of our throats and frost collected on our eyelashes above where our scarves ended, which would melt if you closed your eyes for too long and freeze on your cheeks.

We packed as many of us onto the sled as we could so everyone could have a go. We rode and climbed, rode and climbed until our toes began to burn. “Once more, everybody goes one more time, then we should go in,” Cathy breathed through her scarf. She pushed her butt to the very back of the sled, and motioned for my little sister to shove in front of her, between her legs. I jumped in the front, and my little sister’s snowsuit whistled up against mine as she wrapped her legs around me. The toboggan’s most alluring feature was the two metal emergency brakes on either side, with the black plastic handles molded to fit the shape of your hand. I tried to grab both and steer, but my sister also wanted to hold onto one, and started to whine. “You can each have one,” Cathy ordered. “You steer one way and you can steer on the other side, okay. you guys. Don’t fight about it, everyone else is waiting for their turn. Let’s go.”

About halfway down we flew off a bump. My little sister hauled on her brake and we screeched off the path and smashed into a tree. Cathy’s leg hit first and I heard a snap.

By the time we rolled her onto the sled and pulled her back to the house, her face was glowing blue white and her teeth were chattering. John came running out with a flashlight. He gingerly pulled up the leg of her snow pant, and dropped it again, his face changing from Christmas rum red to moonlight white.

“Jesus Christ. Get the kids in the house and pull the truck around. And get her a blanket, she’s going to emergency. Pat, are you okay to drive?”

A weird silence took over the house after they left. I fell asleep in my clothes on the spare bed and barely woke up when my dad carried me out to the truck hours later.

“Did Cathy live?” I whispered into his ear. He smelled like scotch and shampoo and his new sweater.

“She’s fine. She’s asleep. She’s got a cast and a bottle of painkillers. You can call her in the morning.”

I told my friend Valerie all about it the next day, bragging like it was me. “I tried to save us, but my sister is too little to steer. Cathy’s bone was poking right out of her leg, and she never cried once. There was even blood. Now she has a little rubber thing on the bottom of her cast so she can walk a bit, plus she has crutches.”

“My dad cut the tip of his finger off with a saw once. They sewed it back on,” she reminded me.

“Yeah, but you weren’t even born yet. Besides, a leg is way bigger than a finger. Hurts more.”

Later that winter the wolves got hungry because the government sold too many moose-hunting licenses, and dogs and cats started to disappear. Cathy phoned me one Sunday morning and told me that they had found what was left of Little Chief at the bottom of the mountain the day before.

“I didn’t tell you yesterday because your mom told me you had a hockey game. I know you’re sad, but horses and wolves are animals, and they follow different rules than we do. He had a good horse life, and now the wolves will make it until spring. You were too big to ride him any more anyway, and your little heart will get better in time. Wolves are wolves and men are just people.”

She was tough like that.

When she left John, she was tough too. She took her horse and one duffle bag, and most of his savings to cover her half of the house. She never even cried. Or that’s how I saw her leaving in my mind. Dry-eyed in her pick-up, with the radio on and a cloud of dirt-road dust from the Yukon straight back to Alberta.

Bet she never looked back, I thought.

My uncle started to date one of the other cooks from the lodge. She had a university degree so everyone called her the professor.

My little sister grew up and moved to Calgary. She, like myself, inherited our family loyalty, and looked Cathy up.

My mom and I went to visit my sister at Christmas, and she told me Cathy would love it if I could make it out to visit her in Bragg Creek. But we got snowed in, so I called her the day before we left.

Cathy’s voice sounded the same as I remembered, except more tired. “I can’t believe you’re almost thirty years old. I remember you as just a little girl with that white hair and filthy hands, little chicken legs. You had such big eyes. My God, you were cute. Just let me grab my smokes.”

I could hear dogs barking and a man cursing at them to shut the hell up. A television droned in the background.

She sounded out of breath when she got back on the phone. “Here I am. Hard dragging myself around since my accident. Did Carrie tell you about my legs?”

She had broken both of her femurs straight through a couple of years ago, and had pins in her knees. She still had to walk on two canes and couldn’t work any more.

“I lost the trailer,” she explained. “Couldn’t get worker’s comp because it happened on a weekend, and the unemployment ran out a year ago. Had to move in with Edward and lie about being common-law even to get welfare.”

“What are you saying about me?” I heard the man’s voice again in the background. “Who you talking to anyway?”

“My niece. Turn down the TV for chrissakes.”

“You don’t have any nieces. You don’t even have any brothers or sisters.”

I presumed this was Edward. He obviously didn’t understand family loyalty the way we did. Blood and marriage were only part of it.

“’Member that time you broke your ankle on the sled? You didn’t even cry. You were my hero back then, you know?”

“Well, I cried when I broke my legs this time. I’m still crying. Some fucking hero I am now, huh?”

I heard the empty in her voice and didn’t know what to say. So I told her a story.

“Your old shed is still out behind John’s, you know. Nobody ever goes in there. A couple of years ago John said I should go out and see if your leather tools were still out there. Might as well, since maybe I would use them, and so I did. It was like a time machine in there. Everything was still hanging where you left it.

“I took down your old bullwhip. It didn’t really want to uncurl, but I played with it a little and it warmed up a bit. I took it outside into the corral and screwed around with it. On about the hundredth try or so, I got it to crack. I got so excited by how it jumps in your hand when you get the roll of the arm right that I hauled off and really let one rip. The end of the whip came whistling past my head, and just the tip of it clipped the back of my ear on the way by, and it dropped me right into the dirt. I was afraid to peel my hand from the side of my head to see if there was still an ear there. Hurt like fuck.

“But I thought of you and made myself try a bunch more times until I got it to crack again, you know, so I wouldn’t be too afraid next time. Like you would have done.”

She was quiet for a while on the other end of the line. “You still have some imagination, kid. Always did. You gotta come visit me sometime. I’d love to see what you look like all grown up. I don’t get into Calgary much any more, only when Edward feels like driving, which is never. You’d have to come out here. Carrie could give you directions.”

I’ve been back to Southern Alberta twice since then, but never made it to Bragg Creek to see Cathy Bulahouski, the Polish cowgirl from Calgary. She can’t ride any more, she told me, and I couldn’t bear to ask her if she had cut off her hair.