Close to Spider Man (2 page)

You'll have to watch out for that
, my mother had stated, her concern making lines in her forehead,
maybe I should
have got the one-piece, but all they had was yellow and pink left. You don't like yellow either, do you?

Pink was out of the question. We had already established this.

So the blue and red two-piece it was going to have to be. I was an accomplished tomboy by this time, so I was used to hating my clothes.

It was so easy, the first time, that it didn't even feel like a crime. I just didn't wear the top part. There were lots of little boys still getting changed with their mothers, and nobody noticed me slipping out of my brown cords and striped t-shirt, and padding, bare-chested, out to the poolside alone.

Our swimming instructor was broad-shouldered and walked with her toes pointing out. She was a human bullhorn, bellowing all instructions to us and puntuating each sentence with sharp blasts on a silver whistle which hung about her bulging neck on a leather bootlace.

“Alright, beginners, everyone line up at the shallow end, boys here, girls here, come on come on come on, boys on the left, girls on the right.”

It was that simple, and it only got easier after that.

I wore my trunks under my pants and changed in the boys' room after that first day. The short form of the birth name my parents bestowed me with was androgynous enough to allow my charade to proceed through the entire six weeks of swimming lessons, six weeks of boyhood, six weeks of bliss.

It was easier not to be afraid of things, like diving boards and cannonballs and backstrokes, when nobody expected you to be afraid.

It was easier to jump into the deep end when you didn't have to worry about your top sliding up over your ears. I didn't have to be ashamed of my naked nipples, because I had not covered them up in the first place.

The water running over my shoulders and back felt simple, and natural, and good.

Six weeks lasts a long time when you are six years old, so in the beginning I guess I thought the summer would never really end, that grade two was still an age away. I guess I thought that swimming lessons would continue far enough into the future that I didn't need to worry about report card day.

Or maybe I didn't think at all.

“He
is not afraid of water over his head?” my mom read aloud in the car on the way home. My dad was driving, eyes straight ahead on the road. “He can tread water without a flotation device?” Her eyes were narrow, and hard, and kept trying to catch mine in the rearview mirror. “Your
son
has successfully completed
his
beginner's and intermediate badges and is ready for
his
level one?”

I stared at the toes of my sneakers and said nothing.

“Now excuse me, young lady, but would you like to explain to me just exactly what you have done here? How
many people you have lied to? Have you been parading about all summer half-naked?”

How could I explain to her that it wasn't what I had done, but what I didn't do? That I hadn't lied, because no one had asked? And that I had never, not once, felt naked?

“I can't believe you. You can't be trusted with a two-piece.”

I said nothing all the way home. There was nothing to say. She was right. I couldn't be trusted with a two-piece. Not then, and not now.

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, unforseeable 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 Nor ah 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.

IT SEEMED LIKE A FINE IDEA AT THE TIME. Of course, now I look back and count my ten fingers and toes, my two legs and arms that still function properly, shake my head that sits on top of the neck I have never broken, and thank my guardian angel that I still possess these blessings. But it seemed like a fine idea at the time.

My father is a welder, and his shop was located in the middle of a large and potholed industrial section just off the Alaska Highway on the edge of town. It came complete with snarling guard dogs and broken-down bulldozers, and even had its very own forgotten car and truck graveyard. If you looked up from the dusty ground and buckets of used oil, out behind colourless mechanics' shops and the skeletons of scaffolding, you could see the whole valley stretched out, the Yukon River sparkling blue and snaking through the painted postcard mountains. If you looked up, which I rarely did. There was too much to do.

There were any number of stupid and dangerous activities
to pass the day with, untold numbers of rusty edges to tear your skin and clothes on, a myriad of heavy metal objects to fall off of or get pinned beneath. I don't remember whose idea the tires were. They were not just any tires; they had once pounded dust under earth movers, or dump trucks. They were monsters, and they were everywhere. It took the whole pack of mechanics' kids and welders' daughters and crane operators' sons to move them; getting them up and onto their sides was a feat of team effort and determination, aided by crowbars we pinched from the backs of our dads' pick-ups when no one was looking. Rolling them to the edge of the power line without being noticed involved lookouts and quick action. We knew they would stop us if they found out; we didn't need to ask. The covert element of the operation only added to the thrill of it all.

Only two of us could fit in at a time, which was okay, because we had all summer and plenty of tires. Three or four kids would hold the tire steady, teetering on the edge of the cliff at the top of the power line, and two would climb inside. Kind of like gerbils on one of those exercise wheels, except you would face each other, arms and legs pushing out into the inside of the tire to hold yourself in. Gravity pretty much took care of the rest.

It was better than any roller coaster, not that any of us had been on one. It was the random element of the tire's path that did it. There was just no way to know what that tire was
going to bump into or off of, and the only thing more fun than the roll down was when the tire started to come to a stop at the bottom, and did that roll-on-its-side, flip-flop dance at the bottom of the hill, kind of like a coin does when you flip it and miss and it lands on the linoleum. Only this was a huge dump truck tire with two dirty kids inside, laughing hysterically, laughing until tears ran and our sides hurt the next day. Only one of us ever puked: the heavy duty mechanic's oldest daughter lost her lunch all over her brother one day, and so we never let her ride after that, just sent her into her dads shop to distract him while we rolled tires past his big bay doors out front.