Nobody Cries at Bingo (23 page)

I had my first race at eight am. The organizers tried to put the long distance races early in the am so that the runners wouldn't have to run in the hot sun. Also, so that spectators would not have to suffer through them. Short-distance races like the sexy 100 metres were scheduled at peak hours. “It's not your fault long distance races are so boring,” Celeste comforted me.

Everything I knew about running I had learned from a book. My brother, finding the book in the bathroom, scoffed at my methods. “Only a nerd reads about jogging!”

What did he know? He ran on the outside of his feet. Sure he was fast but what about in 20 years when the strain injuries started to show up? What about then, huh!

The book taught me that you must always run, heel-toe, heel-toe. I found this advice very helpful as long as I didn't question it too much. I mean, who really walked toe-heel? It wasn't even possible.

My first race was called the 3000 metres on account of its length. It was 13.25 times around the 400 metre track. In any race, two of the participants would be serious runners, the third would be an okay runner, and the fourth would be some poor schmuck who signed up without knowing how far 3000 metres really was.

However, in this particular race, I decided to challenge myself further. It wasn't intentional. I had been digging through my older sister's closet and had found a pair of blue short-shorts. I put them on and found that they sat easily on my hips. They put little pressure on my tummy and as a result I felt thin when I wore them. The baby blue was also flattering on my legs. And they were short which was always good for running. As I lined up with the other runners, I felt proud knowing that I looked the cutest in my shorts.

The gun went off and the runners hurried to form a line that quickly stretched half way around the track. I was in first place and increasing my lead with every step when I first felt my shorts inch down my waist. It seemed that my shorts were so flattering because they lacked an elastic waistband. And without an elastic band or hips, there was nothing to keep them up. They began to slide down. I grabbed onto them with my right hand and pumped with my left.

It was only the first lap out of thirteen. I realized that I had two choices: one, quit the race and run back to our tent and cry, or two, finish the race and then run back to our tent and cry. I looked behind me; the other runners were far behind. I made my choice. I was going for it.

The race felt very long that day. I had to switch hands every half lap as one arm would get tired. One of the other runners ran up to challenge me and I blocked the challenge by pumping harder with my left hand, which apparently was my better running hand. After the runner backed off, thankfully too winded to comment on my shorts, I kept up the pace. The best way to get this race over with quickly was to run as fast as possible, so that's what I did.

After the race, I walked over to Celeste who sat on a blanket with some of our friends. By this time my shorts were stretched out several sizes too large. No more sexy short-shorts, they were now a blousy wrinkled blue diaper.

“Good race. Congrats.”

I nodded. “Did you notice anything?”

“Yeah, those other runners sure were slow.”

“Anything else?”

“It looked like you were moving pretty fast.”

“Anything else?”

She smiled. It turned into a smirk. “Well, your right hand sure was busy.” She stared at my hand still holding onto my shorts.

The best part of being a long distance runner is that you can eat anything. Every day I ordered a hot dog, fries and a drink. I sat at a picnic table in broad view of everyone and ate it without guilt or shame. I had a gold medal and this meant everything I did must be right. Even my mom agreed. “Get those calories in there. You're gonna need them,” she said as she massaged my shoulders. While Mom was never big on encouragement in the early stages of an endeavor, she was a pro at jumping on board when things were going well: she was a good Coattails Mom.

Ricky Senior sat down next to us. “This girl of yours sure is something.”

My mom agreed. “She's a natural athlete like her dad. Although I wasn't too bad myself, I mean no one could throw a ball further backwards than I could.”

Ricky Senior looked me over like a rancher might examine a steer. “This one is definitely long-winded.”

Long-winded? I pondered this as I ate my fries. I supposed that was a good thing.

He added, “She's barrel-chested too. Means she's got big lungs.”

I guessed that could be taken as a compliment, if I were a horse.

“Then there's her head. See how round it is — cuts down on wind resistance. It's pretty big, but that's why it's good that her neck is so short and thick.”

I walked away before I could hear any more of his “flattering” remarks. I had no doubt that he had compliments a-plenty for other parts of my anatomy. Perhaps my big flat feet, or my tree trunk legs, or my aerodynamic face. In any event, I needed no more praise. It had been confirmed by a source other than my mom, or myself: I was a natural athlete. Take that Mr. Broderick, I said under my breath. Then I finished my coke and went to take a nap.

S
ECOND
B
EST
F
RIEND

O
NE YEAR THE
I
NDIAN SUMMER GAMES WERE
held in Meadow Lake, a northern reserve about eight hours from ours. Both Celeste and I had made the cut for the File Hills track and field and softball teams — which meant we had written our names down on the sign-up sheet. Our brother couldn't make it because he was in hockey school. For the same reason, my mom couldn't come with us.

“You're going to be okay, right?” Mom said as I packed up my clothes.

“Of course.”

“It's only a week and you can call me collect anytime you want.”

“Mom, I'm thirteen, I don't get homesick anymore.”

Mom raised an eyebrow; there had been an incident only a few weeks before.

“That was different. Someone spilled pop on my sleeping bag, I can't sleep in a wet sleeping bag. I could get double pneumonia.”

Celeste, my best friend Samantha and I travelled with the other athletes on a chartered bus from File Hills to the Meadow Lake First Nation. I had been worried about being bored on the eight hour long bus ride even though the bus had a TV that played movies, so I brought a small collection of ten or twelve books.

There was no watching or reading on this trip. The boys made sure of that. They dared each other to flash their dicks or behinds to other cars, to run up and down the aisle and generally make fool of themselves and endanger everyone in the process. Us girls rolled our eyes at them; secretly we adored every stupid thing they did.

I declared that Jared Bighead was the cutest guy that God had ever put on the face of the earth. He had dark black hair and long eyelashes. His eyes were a golden brown that matched his perfect tan. He was a fast runner and an excellent ball player. He was also my third cousin.

“All those Bighead boys are good ball players,” Mom had commented when she saw him play, “Just like their dad. My
cousin
.” The word was pronounced in bold with italics and double underlined for emphasis but it had no significance to my sister and me. Mom implied that we were related to every boy within a five-hundred-mile radius. We had heard her say, “Too bad he's your cousin,” so often we no longer paid attention.

Mom counted cousins up to fifteenth and sixteenth. And, if you called bullshit, she would pull out her family tree that she had painstakingly designed in her Adult Social Studies course and show us the exact relationship.

“It's not like I want kids with him or anything,” I said to my sister the night before, as we wrote out our crushes' names three hundred times.

“You do want to marry him, don't you?”

“That's when we're twenty-three years old and he's a banker and I'm a lawyer and we have a house in Hawaii.”

“Hey, am I still getting the second biggest bedroom that faces the ocean?”

“Yes. Now stop asking.”

Samantha had been my best friend for one whole year. That was a new record for me. It's not that I wasn't a good friend, although I certainly wasn't a great friend. I forgot birthdays and if a friend tried to hug me, I laughed at them. I blamed my lack of friendship skills on my early isolation from normal human beings. For the first ten years of my life, I only hung out with my sister and cousins who indulged my bossiness.

Also, my friendships were of short duration. My buddies were all Aboriginal girls and they had a tendency to relocate in the middle of the year or at the end of each year. Their parents would decide that they were moving to the city or to a new province or that they should put their kids in the local boarding school in order to stop disrupting their academic careers.

My mother had decided early on that we would never switch schools. I appreciated the stability but I disliked the effect on my social life. Whereas my friends were making friends with Native kids from around the province, I was only able to befriend the people who came to Balcarres School.

And unfortunately, the majority of Aboriginal people in the area had declared Balcarres racist. There were only a few Native families who kept their children there. In fact, Edward Pinay was the only Native kid that started with me and graduated with me.

Samantha was an extrovert who loved having lots of friends. She actively kept up friendships when other people might stop. She would write letters to me when she moved to the city and then when she moved back to the reserve and started school at the Peepeekisis School, she called me daily. Samantha would even get her parents to drop her off at our house with a backpack and would spend anywhere from a day to a couple weeks at our house.

Samantha was an athlete. She was built for speed with her muscular body and huge bum. The latter embarrassed her. At pow-wows, boys would run up behind her and pinch it. She told her dad. “Well, if he pinched you anywhere, he'd probably hit that thing,” he joked. If my dad had said something like that to me in public, I would have crawled up into a ball and died in the dirt.

Samantha didn't care. She was fearless. I was shy and depended on her for introduction to other kids.

“This is my friend Dawn; she's really smart.”

I would make a face as if to say, I'm not really smart. I wouldn't verbally deny it because secretly I believed I had a genius IQ. I used this belief to make myself feel better in times of stress. “The reason why they are calling me names is because they are scared of my intellect.” Yes, that was it.

Samantha was not afraid to talk to anyone. Sometimes she didn't know what to say. I always had something to say but didn't have the courage to say it. So we compromised.

“Nice T-shirt, where'd you get it? Your grandma's closet,” I mumbled under my breath.

“Hey, Loser, quit robbing your grandma's closet,” Samantha said loudly. Everyone laughed and Samantha would wink at me. I would grin back. We were a great team.