Close to Spider Man

by Ivan E. Coyote

  CLOSE TO SPIDER MAN

  CLOSE TO SPIDER MAN

  †

  stories

  Ivan E. Coyote

  CLOSE TO SPIDER MAN

  Copyright © 2000 by Ivan E. Coyote

  Second printing: 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical – without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  341 Water Street, Suite 200

  Vancouver, BC

  Canada V6B 1B8

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Earlier versions of “She Comes Home a Moth” and “You’re not in Kansas Anymore” appeared in The Loop, and versions of “Walks Like,” “Three Left Turns,” and “Manifestation” appeared in Boys Like Her by Taste This (Press Gang, 1999).

  Designed by Solo

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  Coyote, Ivan E. (Ivan Elizabeth), 1969-

  Close to Spider Man

  ISBN 1-55152-086-9

  I. Title.

  PS8555.099C56 2000 C813’.6 C00-9I0925-0

  PR9199.3.C6682C56 2000

  She Comes Home a Moth

  Walks Like

  No Bikini

  Three Left Turns

  Sticks and Stones

  The Cat Came Back

  Close To Spiderman

  Eggcups

  Manifestation

  This, That, and the Other Thing

  There Goes the Bride

  You’re Not In Kansas Anymore

  Red Sock Circle Dance

  This book is dedicated to Joe Hiscott, my un-partner, and to Pat Daws, my mother, for letting me tell it my way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Zoë Eakle, Anna Camilleri, and Lyndell Montgomery, my fellow authors of Boys Like Her and stagemates, for their friendship and talent. They have, and continue to be, a source of inspiration and/or butt-kicks, whichever is deemed to be most necessary at the time. Thanks also to my cousin Trish Leeper, fellow artist in the family, for her belief in me and for explaining to our relatives that I do indeed have a real job. Love and thanks to Chantal Sundquist and Tamara Brewster for being the best brothers a fella could ask for.

  Many thanks to Brian Lam and Blaine Kyllo and the folks at Arsenal Pulp Press for keeping it all together, even when I ran off with the circus.

  CLOSE TO SPIDER MAN

  SHE COMES HOME A MOTH

  EVERYONE ON OUR STREET HAD KIDS. It was that kind of street: Hemlock Street, a dusty little L-shaped road with a fence at one end. I wouldn’t call the place where our street stopped a dead end, though, because that’s where it all started: the old dump road, the power line, the veins in a leaf-like network of trails that led to our places. The places we built forts, tobogganed in green garbage bags, and learned how to ride after our dads took the blocks off our pedals.

  My mom tells the story of how she met your mom, awake in the night, pacing in front of the living room window, a small, crying bundle in her arms. That bundle was me. There was only one other light on the block, in the house right across the street. Inside the light stood a woman, holding a baby. She shrugged, a you-too, huh? kind of movement with her shoulders, and waved at my mother.

  They didn’t get a chance to meet for a couple more days – your mom worked in the evenings and mine in the day – but they would be together late at night, in their windows, with the road and the dark between them, in separate circles of light.

  One Friday night your mom knocked on our door. “Could you take her?” She meant you. “Pierre and I, we need to go away for a couple of hours. Can you watch my baby? Her name is Valerie.”

  So I only remember a time when there was you. You can remember details, whole conversations and dates; I cannot. I remember colours, our hands stained with cranberries. You had long brown hair. We both had a pair of red pants.

  We were always together. Your dad called us cheese and crackers. We never kissed.

  I liked how you hardly said anything when there were adults around, but how when we were alone your soft voice spilled out plans: now how ‘bout we play this? We usually fundamentally disagreed on what we were or should be playing, but never considered other partners.

  I remember when your grandmother came to visit from France; her voice was bigger than she was, and your father was the interpreter. She shook her head and laughed at my mother. “How come everyday you send this one out looking like a butterfly, and she comes home a moth?”

  You always kept your knees clean.

  My mom let us use her bike one day. We were going to the store, and her bike had a basket in front. It was way too big for me, but I pedalled with much concentration, my tongue pressed between my lips. You sat on the seat, legs dangling, your summer-brown thumbs in my belt loops.

  We had to go down the big hill next to the meadow where boys smoked cigarettes sometimes, and your grip on my waist tightened. “You’re driving too faaaast. Slow dooown.” Your voice was bumpy from the gravel and potholes on the road.

  Unfamiliar with the physics of a three-speed, I slammed on what turned out to be the front brakes, and that’s when the tragedy happened. The road rash would heal, the hole in the knee of my cords could be mended, but your hair? Now we were in trouble. One of your braids had gotten caught in the spokes of the front wheel as we went over the handlebars, and been chopped off. We immediately aborted the mission and went straight back to your place.

  We called out soon as we came through the front door, our faces grim and tear-streaked. Your father came flying naked out of the shower, and did the preliminary medical inspections with no clothes on at all. Only when he realized there were no broken bones or stitches needed did he disappear back into the bathroom, returning with bandaids and iodine, a damp towel around his waist.

  He shook his head sadly at your lopsided braid: “Just wait till your Maman gets home.” Hair was a female domain; it was she that we would have to answer to for this, and we knew it. “How did you let this happen?” He was looking at me when he asked.

  I slunk home, and told the story to my mother. The only thing more horrifying to me than what had happened to your hair was the sight of my very first naked man, hairy and dark and smelling of aftershave.

  My mom had a logical explanation for this.

  “Well, you know how the Salezes are different from us? Like how Grace lets you guys colour on the walls in Val’s room, but I would kill you both if you did that here? Well, that’s why Pierre had no clothes on. They’re French.”

  This made perfect sense to me at the time.

  I don’t remember the day you left, I just remember you being gone. I think it was the first time I ever missed someone. Everyone else I loved never went anywhere. And France was such a far away place, farther even than Vancouver, too far away to phone, too far away to hope you would ever come back.

  Twenty years later I saw your name on an ad. You had a video camera and were looking for gigs. It couldn’t be you, but I called anyway.

  “Is your name Valerie Salez?”

  “Did you used to live in the Yukon?”

  “Was your father French? D
id your mother talk a lot?”

  We were only blocks away. I went to your place that same night. We said the same thing to each other at exactly the same time right before you hugged me.

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  WALKS LIKE

  THE FABRIC OF THIS MEMORY IS FADED, its edges frayed by time.

  The young girl who lived it is now just a ghost inside of me. I can remember only her bones; the skin and flesh of her are brought to me in the stories of others. Mothers, uncles, and aunts remind me of the kind of child I was then.

  There was the smell of Christmas everywhere, I do remember that, pine trees and woodsmoke and rumcake. The women smelled of gift perfume, the men of new sweaters.

  Everywhere were voices, maybe a dozen different conversations woven together in the rise and fall of talk and laughter that is the backdrop of all my mind’s snapshots of my family then, a huge room full of people connected to me by their blood.

  I was sitting almost too close to the fire. Iced window panes separated us from the bitter white of winter outside. Everyone I’d ever known was still alive.

  I was about four years old.

  Both of my grandmothers sat in overstuffed chairs next to the fireplace, talking, a trace of Cockney, and a hint of an Irish lilt, respectively.

  I sat on the thick rug between them, rolling a red metal firetruck up and down my white-stockinged legs, making motor, gear-changing, braking noises. Listening.

  “You should have seen the fuss this morning, getting her into that dress, I tell you, Pat, Fd’ve never stood for it from any of my girls. You’d’ve thought I was boiling her in oil, the way she was carrying on. She wanted to wear those filthy brown corduroy pants again, imagine that, and she knows we’re going to mass tonight.” My mother’s mother clicked her tongue and sent a stern glance in my general direction.

  “That was what all my boys were like, Flo. Really, if you could have seen me the day that portrait on the wall there was taken, I swear I didn’t have a nerve left for them to get on. Like pulling teeth, you know it was, to dress those four.”

  “Well you’d expect it from the boys, you know, it’s only natural. But her, I don’t understand it. Her mother always liked to dress up, and never a speck of dirt could you find on my Norah . . . look here, come here you.” She curled an arthritic finger at me.

  I stood up reluctantly and dragged my feet across the car-pet toward her, hoping for a good spark.

  “Look, see what I mean? Look at her knees, how does she do it? It’s only been a couple of hours, and there’s only snow on the ground out there. I couldn’t find any dirt right now if I went out looking. Here, let me fix up that zipper. . . .”

  My small fingers shot up to intercept her, and a rather large bolt of static electricity flashed between us. She pulled her gnarled hand back for a moment, and then brought it down on the back of mine.

  “What a nasty thing to do to your poor old gran! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Now, run and fetch us both a rumball, and for the love of Mary, don’t get it all over the front of you.”

  I looked over to my other grandmother, at the shadow of an evil smile which pulled at the corners of her mouth. She winked at me, and motioned for me to be off.

  “See what I mean about her, Pat? I’m worried sick she’ll turn out to be an old maid. What happens when she starts school? Look, now . . . she even walks like a little boy. . . .”

  “You’re far too hard on her, Flo,” came the voice of the mother of my father from behind me, laced with just a hint of annoyance. “She will be just fine. She just walks like that. That’s just how she walks.”

  NO BIKINI

  I HAD A SEX CHANGE ONCE, WHEN I WAS six years old.

  The Lions pool where I grew up smelled like every other swimming pool everywhere. That’s the thing about pools. Same smell. Doesn’t matter where you are.

  It was summer swimming lessons, it was a little red badge with white trim we were all after: beginners, age five to seven. My mom had bought me a bikini.

  It was one of those little girl bikinis, a two-piece, I guess you would call it. The top part fit like a tight cut-off t-shirt, red with blue squares on it, the bottoms were longer than panties but shorter than shorts, blue with red squares. I had tried it on the night before when my mom got home from work and found that if I raised both my arms completely above my head too quickly, the top would slide up over my flat chest and people could see my . . . you-know-whats.

  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.

  THREE LEFT TURNS

  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.