Traplines (21 page)

In my dream Jimmy’s casting a fishing rod. I’m afraid of getting hooked, so I sit at the bow of the skiff. The ocean is mildly choppy, the sky is hard blue, the air is cool. Jimmy reaches over to kiss me, but now he is soaking wet. His hands and lips are cold, his eyes are sunken and dull. Something moves in his mouth. It isn’t his tongue. When I pull away, a crab drops from his lips and Jimmy laughs. “Miss me?”

I feel a scream in my throat but nothing comes out.

“What’s the matter?” Jimmy tilts his head. Water runs off his hair and drips into the boat. “Crab got your tongue?”

This one’s outside Hanky Panky’s. The woman is so totally bigger than me it isn’t funny. Still, she doesn’t like getting hurt. She’s afraid of the pain but can’t back down because she started it. She’s grabbing my hair, yanking it hard. I pull hers. We get stuck there, bent over, trying to kick each other, neither one of us willing to let go. My friends are laughing their heads off. I’m pissed at that but I’m too sloshed to let go. In the morning my scalp will throb and be so tender I won’t be able to comb my hair. At that moment, a bouncer comes over and splits us apart. The woman tries to kick me but kicks him instead and he knocks her down. My friends grab my arm and steer me to the bus stop.

Jimmy and I lay down together on a sleeping bag in a field of fireweed. The forest fire the year before had razed the
place and the weeds had only sprouted back up about a month earlier. With the spring sun and just the right sprinkling of rain, they were as tall as sunflowers, as dark pink as prize roses, swaying around us in the night breeze.

Jimmy popped open a bottle of Baby Duck. “May I?” he said, reaching down to untie my sneaker.

“You may,” I said.

He carefully lifted the sneaker and poured in some Baby Duck. Then he raised it to my lips and I drank. We lay down, flattening fireweed and knocking over the bottle. Jimmy nibbled my ear. I drew circles in the bend of his arm. Headlights came up fast, then disappeared down the highway. We watched the fireweed shimmer and wave in the wind.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Jimmy said. “What’re you thinking?”

I almost told him then. I wanted to tell him. I wanted someone else to know and not have it locked inside me. I kept starting and then chickening out. What was the point? He’d probably pull away from me in horror, disgusted, revolted.

“I want to ask you something,” Jimmy whispered. I closed my eyes, feeling my chest tighten. “You hungry? I’ve got a monster craving for chicken wings.”

When I got to Aunt Erma’s the light in the hallway was going spastic, flickering like a strobe, little bright flashes then darkness so deep I had to feel my way along the wall. I
stopped in front of the door, sweating, smelling myself through the thick layer of deodorant. I felt my stomach go queasy and wondered if I was going to throw up after all. I hadn’t eaten and was still bleeding heavily.

Aunt Erma lived in east Van in a low-income government housing unit. Light showed under the door. I knocked. I could hear the familiar opening of
Star Trek
, the old version, with the trumpets blaring. I knocked again.

The door swung open and a girl with a purple mohawk and Cleopatra eyeliner thrust money at me.

“Shit,” she said. She looked me up and down, pulling the money back. “Where’s the pizza?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I have the wrong house.”

“Pizza, pizza, pizza!” teenaged voices inside screamed. Someone was banging the floor in time to the chant.

“You with Cola?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “No. I’m here to see Erma Williamson. Is she in?”

“In? I guess. Mom?” she screamed. “Mom? It’s for you!”

A whoop rose up. “Erma and Marley sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes lust—”

“Shut up, you social rejects!”

“—then comes humping, then comes a baby after all that bumping!”

“How many times did they boink last night!” a single voice yelled over the laughter.

“Ten!” the voices chorused enthusiastically. “Twenty! Thirty! Forty!”

“Hey! Who’s buying the pizza, eh? No respect! I get no respect!”

Aunt Erma came to the door. She didn’t look much different from her pictures, except she wasn’t wearing her cat-eye glasses.

She stared at me, puzzled. Then she spread open her arms.

“Adelaine, baby! I wasn’t expecting you! Hey, come on in and say hi to your cousins. Pepsi! Cola! Look who came by for your birthday!”

She gave me a tight bear hug and I wanted to cry.

Two girls stood at the entrance to the living room, identical right down to their lip rings. They had different colored Mohawks though—one pink, one purple.

“Erica?” I said, peering. I vaguely remembered them as having pigtails and making fun of Mr. Rogers. “Heather?”

“It’s Pepsi,” the purple Mohawk said. “Not, n-o-t, Erica.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Cola,” the pink-Mohawked girl said, turning around and ignoring me to watch TV.

“What’d you bring us?” Pepsi said matter-of-factly.

“Excuse the fruit of my loins,” Aunt Erma said, leading me into the living room and sitting me between two guys who were glued to the TV. “They’ve temporarily lost their manners. I’m putting it down to hormones and hoping the birth control pills turn them back into normal human beings.”

Aunt Erma introduced me to everyone in the room, but their names went in one ear and out the other. I was so relieved just to be there and out of the clinic I couldn’t concentrate on much else.

“How is he, Bones?” the guy on my right said, exactly in synch with Captain Kirk on TV. Captain Kirk was standing
over McCoy and a prone security guard with large purple circles all over his face.

“He’s dead, Jim,” the guy on my left said.

“I wanna watch something else,” Pepsi said. “This sucks.”

She was booed.

“Hey, it’s my birthday. I can watch what I want.”

“Siddown,” Cola said. “You’re out-voted.”

“You guys have no taste at all. This is crap. I just can’t believe you guys are watching this—this cultural pabulum. I—”

A pair of panties hit her in the face. The doorbell rang and the pink-haired girl held the pizza boxes over her head and yelled, “Dinner’s ready!”

“Eat in the kitchen,” Aunt Erma said. “All of youse. I ain’t scraping your cheese out of my carpet.”

Everyone left except me and Pepsi. She grabbed the remote control and flipped through a bunch of channels until we arrived at one where an announcer for the World Wrestling Federation screamed that the ref was blind.

“Now this,” Pepsi said, “is entertainment.”

By the time the party ended, I was snoring on the couch. Pepsi shook my shoulder. She and Cola were watching Bugs Bunny and Tweety.

“If we’re bothering you,” Cola said. “You can go crash in my room.”

“Thanks,” I said. I rolled off the couch, grabbed my backpack, and found the bathroom on the second floor. I made it just in time to throw up in the sink. The cramps didn’t come back as badly as on the bus, but I took three Extra-Strength
Tylenols anyway. My pad had soaked right through and leaked all over my underwear. I put on clean clothes and crashed in one of the beds. I wanted a black hole to open up and suck me out of the universe.

When I woke, I discovered I should have put on a diaper. It looked like something had been hideously murdered on the mattress.

“God,” I said just as Pepsi walked in. I snatched up the blanket and tried to cover the mess.

“Man,” Pepsi said. “Who are you? Carrie?”

“Freaky,” Cola said, coming in behind her. “You okay?”

I nodded. I wished I’d never been born.

Pepsi hit my hand when I touched the sheets. “You’re not the only one with killer periods.” She pushed me out of the bedroom. In the bathroom she started water going in the tub for me, poured some Mr. Bubble in, and left without saying anything. I stripped off my blood-soaked underwear and hid them in the bottom of the garbage. There would be no saving them. I lay back. The bubbles popped and gradually the water became cool. I was smelly and gross. I scrubbed hard but the smell wouldn’t go away.

“You still alive in there?” Pepsi said, opening the door.

I jumped up and whisked the shower curtain shut.

“Jesus, don’t you knock?”

“Well, excuuuse me. I brought you a bathrobe. Good thing you finally crawled out of bed. Mom told us to make you eat something before we left. We got Ichiban, Kraft, or hot dogs. You want anything else, you gotta make it yourself. What do you want?”

“Privacy.”

“We got Ichiban, Kraft, or hot dogs. What do you want?”

“The noodles,” I said, more to get her out than because I was hungry.

She left and I tried to lock the door. It wouldn’t lock so I scrubbed myself off quickly. I stopped when I saw the bathwater. It was dark pink with blood.

I crashed on the couch and woke when I heard sirens. I hobbled to the front window in time to see an ambulance pull into the parking lot. The attendants wheeled a man bound to a stretcher across the lot. He was screaming about the eyes in the walls that were watching him, waiting for him to fall asleep so they could come peel his skin from his body.

Aunt Erma, the twins, and I drove to the powwow at the Trout Lake community center in East Vancouver. I was still bleeding a little and felt pretty lousy, but Aunt Erma was doing fundraising for the Helping Hands Society and had asked me to work her bannock booth. I wanted to help her out.

Pepsi had come along just to meet guys, dressed up in her flashiest bracelets and most conservatively ripped jeans. Aunt Erma enlisted her too, when she found out that none of her other volunteers had showed up. Pepsi was disgusted.

Cola got out of working at the booth because she was one of the jingle dancers. Aunt Erma had made her outfit, a form-fitting red dress with silver jingles that flashed and twinkled as she walked. Cola wore a bobbed wig to cover her pink mowhawk. Pepsi bugged her about it, but Cola airily waved good-bye and said, “Have fun.”

I hadn’t made fry bread in a long time. The first three batches were already mixed. I just added water and kneaded
them into shapes roughly the size of a large doughnut, then threw them in the electric frying pan. The oil spattered and crackled and steamed because I’d turned the heat up too high. Pepsi wasn’t much better. She burned her first batch and then had to leave so she could watch Cola dance.

“Be right back,” she said. She gave me a thumbs-up sign and disappeared into the crowd.

The heat from the frying pan and the sun was fierce. I wished I’d thought to bring an umbrella. One of the organizers gave me her baseball cap. Someone else brought me a glass of water. I wondered how much longer Pepsi was going to be. My arms were starting to hurt.

I flattened six more pieces of bread into shape and threw them in the pan, beyond caring anymore that none of them were symmetrical. I could feel the sun sizzling my forearms, my hands, my neck, my legs. A headache throbbed at the base of my skull.

The people came in swarms, buzzing groups of tourists, conventioneers on a break, families, and assorted browsers. Six women wearing
HI! MY NAME IS
tags stopped and bought all the fry bread I had. Another hoard came and a line started at my end of the table.

“Last batch!” I shouted to the cashiers. They waved at me.

“What are you making?” someone asked.

I looked up. A middle-aged red-headed man in a business suit stared at me. At the beginning, when we were still feeling spunky, Pepsi and I had had fun with that question. We said, Oh, this is fish-head bread. Or fried beer foam. But bullshitting took energy.

“Fry bread,” I said. “This is my last batch.”

“Is it good?”

“I don’t think you’ll find out,” I said. “It’s all gone.”

The man looked at my tray. “There seems to be more than enough. Do I buy it from you?”

“No, the cashier, but you’re out of luck, it’s all sold.” I pointed to the line of people.

“Do you do this for a living?” the man said.

“Volunteer work. Raising money for the Helping Hands,” I said.

“Are you Indian then?”

A hundred stupid answers came to my head but like I said, bullshit is work. “Haisla. And you?”

He blinked. “Is that a tribe?”

“Excuse me,” I said, taking the fry bread out of the pan and passing it down to the cashier.

The man slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Make another batch.”

“I’m tired,” I said.

He put down another twenty.

“You don’t understand. I’ve been doing this since this morning. You could put a million bucks on the table and I wouldn’t change my mind.”

He put five twenty-dollar bills on the table.

It was all for the Helping Hands, I figured, and he wasn’t going to budge. I emptied the flour bag into the bowl. I measured out a handful of baking powder, a few fingers of salt, a thumb of lard. Sweat dribbled over my face, down the tip of my nose, and into the mix as I kneaded the dough until it was very soft but hard to shape. For a hundred bucks I made sure the pieces of fry bread were roughly the same shape.

“You have strong hands,” the man said.

“I’m selling fry bread.”

“Of course.”

I could feel him watching me, was suddenly aware of how far my shirt dipped and how short my cutoffs were. In the heat, they were necessary. I was sweating too much to wear anything more.

“My name is Arnold,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you, Arnold,” I said. “Scuse me if I don’t shake hands. You with the convention?”

“No. I’m here on vacation.”

He had teeth so perfect I wondered if they were dentures. No, probably caps. I bet he took exquisite care of his teeth.

We said nothing more until I’d fried the last piece of bread. I handed him the plate and bowed. I expected him to leave then, but he bowed back and said, “Thank you.”

“No,” I said. “Thank you. The money’s going to a good cause. It’ll—”

“How should I eat these?” he interrupted me.

With your mouth, asshole. “Put some syrup on them, or jam, or honey. Anything you want.”