by Dawn Dumont
“I am never playing with you again,” I told him after our punishment was over. “Leave me alone.”
Shane sat down next to me and then said. “Hey, did you know I had pizza last night? It had pineapples.”
“It did not.”
“It did. I promise you! It did!”
“You are a liar.”
“No! I’m SD Best!” This was Shane’s name for himself and also his catchphrase.
“Shane!”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!”
Shane and I built forts in our basement and planned our life together. I would draw a picture of our house and show him all the bedrooms and the multiple living rooms.
“This is your bedroom, this is mine, this is Celeste’s, this is Dylan’s, this is David’s.” The houses were always mansions because our future was bright and we planned on sharing it with everyone. We were going to need a very large house.
“I like you, Dawn.”
“I know.”
“I want us to be together forever.”
Moments later the fort would be destroyed, usually by Shane, but the promises remained.
I could hear mumblings through the walls. That’s how you found stuff out. Mom and Geraldine’s voices were lowered to whispers. It didn’t matter how low they spoke because tension flows right through drywall. It would take years to piece the story together but I knew something was wrong, that a door was closing.
In my bedroom, I sat on my bed and prayed. “What do I do God? How do I help my friend?” He was silent so I knelt on the floor, sure that the sacrifice of my knees would show the heavens that I was serious. “Please tell me what to do, God.”
There was no voice in my head.
So I just went on as before. It was hard, though, because everything was changing at once. We hardly got to visit Shane and Dylan anymore because Mom never knew if they were going to be home or not.
“I don’t know where Gerry is taking them,” Mom said. “I don’t know if she’ll even be able to keep them now that her and Richard are breaking up.”
My heart would leap into my throat. I knew a bit about foster children from my aunts who had kept children for years and years. Sometimes the children went away and you never got to see them again.
I carefully chose my next words. “If she’s gonna lose them, could we adopt them?”
Mom pursed her lips together and turned away without speaking, which means no in every single language in the world. I went to my bedroom and stared up at the ceiling. Was that my moment? Was that my chance to help my friend? When the saints did God’s work, it was usually something big like defying a king — of course, they did usually get eaten by lions afterwards.
Things had changed over at our friends’ house. Shane wasn’t as smiley and Dylan was even quieter.
One day Celeste and I gathered together all the change in our drawers. We even rifled through Mom’s jeans and found a few bills. On our next visit, we gave the money to Dylan and Shane.
“What’s this for?” asked Dylan.
“It’s for you guys. So you can run away.”
“All right!” said Shane, “we can buy some food with this money and go live in the woods.”
Dylan frowned. “Where did you get this money?”
“We found it.”
“We can’t keep this, we’ll get in trouble if someone finds it.” He pushed it back towards us.
“It’s yours!” I was getting angry. For God’s sake, didn’t they realize that I was trying to do God’s work? Why did helping people have to be so damned hard!
In the end, we compromised. On our next trip to town we spent the money on snacks and comic books that we read sprawled out on the boys’ bunk beds.
On one of the last days, Shane and I went down to the stable. There was a single horse standing there and Shane caught her. It wasn’t Ruby the assbiter, but a calm sorrel horse that had never been ridden (I didn’t know that at the time.) Shane grabbed her by the bridle and coaxed her next to the fence where I was perched. He brought her close enough for me to climb on, clambered up in front of me and we rode around the barn.
“I love this horse,” I said. I loved all horses, except Ruby.
“Watch this!” Shane said, as he put his hands up in the air. I’m still not sure what he was trying to show me because at that moment one of his sleeves got caught on a nail on the roof of the barn. The sorrel kept going but Shane’s progress was paused. Frantically he tried to pull himself free but we ran out of horse before it could be accomplished. I fell to the ground first. Shane lingered a moment longer in the air, then his shirt ripped and he came tumbling down.
“You idiot moron!” I jumped to my feet and dusted off my behind.
“That was great! Let’s do it again!”
“Why do you have to ruin everything!” I said.
Shane laughed.
He ran off and found the sorrel that had wandered out of the barn. He pulled her back and we repeated the process. This time, Shane kept his hands down.
There was a trail that led away from Geraldine and Richard’s house. We had never gone that way before. On this day Shane steered the pony in that direction. I clasped my hands around his narrow waist as we rode down the path.
BOYS CATCH THE GIRLS
FOR THE MAJORITY OF MY SCHOOL CAREER, I went to Balcarres School or BS as it was known on the side of our school jackets. Balcarres was a small school with less than five hundred students in total even though it included an elementary, junior high and high school. At some point in history the school had been huge. The classrooms had teemed with students and new additions had to be built to accommodate the overflow. Reminders of the school’s glory days still lingered; it had a regulation sized football field and old football uniforms locked in the gym supply room. Its heyday had passed a long time before I walked through the door.
Unlike most of the schools in the area, this one was surviving. As other shut down, Balcarres greedily absorbed their students.
Part of Balcarres survival was due to its close proximity to File Hills. Each morning five busses carried the Native students in from the four reserves. Together the Native and white students could barely fill the classrooms, still we managed to create two separate worlds. The segregation began in elementary and grew more defined with each year. You might know Nina Buffaloskull’s name in Kindergarten, that she could stuff three carrot sticks up her nose. By graduation you would not acknowledge her or her talents.
I had chosen my world on my first day at the school, as a new student, after February. My parents’ — always thrilling — relationship had taken us from northern Manitoba, to Fort Qu’Appelle and back to the reserve in less than six months. My older sister and I had attended two different schools by the Christmas break. I was glad to be starting again; I hadn’t liked my other two teachers. Both of them had been young and shrill and really adamant about singing every day.
When I saw Mrs. Green with her salt and pepper hair and her smile, just the right amount of friendly, and the right amount of firm, I knew I was in the right place. That’s how everyone felt around teachers like that. You could trust your academic career in their weathered hands.
After the twenty-five year mark, such teachers no longer feared their students. They could size you up in thirty seconds and know exactly how much trouble you would give them. They knew which kids would make it and which kids would be shunted to the back of the classroom. Mrs. Green took one look at my messy hair that had fallen out of its braid, my clothes that were ill fitting but clean, and knew that someone was trying to steer me straight despite my natural proclivity towards sloppiness. It was my eager smile that gave away my defining quality — a desperate need to please. Mrs. Green placed me at the front of the classroom.
At my first recess break, she held me by the shoulders and pointed me at all the students. “Who do you want to play with?” she asked me.
My eyes searched the rows of expectant faces. I recognized o
ne face from a few weeks I had spent at a nursery school on the reserve. “Trina,” I said pointing at a tall girl with long braids. Trina came up to the front and took my hand. Everyone nodded as if this was what they had expected. The matter was decided; I was Native.
From then on there was no expectation that I would ever associate with the non-Native girls.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t curious about them. I would watch them walk together at recess. They would often surround the supervising teacher and hold her hand as she walked through the playground. Elsewhere, they played in clusters. I observed them from time to time but could not figure out their games. “Hmm . . . it appears that the blonde one is the leader. However, the brunette always gets her way if she pouts. The girl who always has new clothes never wants to do anything. It must be hard to get a good game of wrassling together with this bunch.”
Inevitably my interest would fade and I’d run back to a group of Native (or Indian kids as we called ourselves at the time.)
In our group, I was a much-requested wrestling partner during recess time.
My girlfriends did not share my interest so they would cheer me on from the sidelines as they played “practice smoking.”
“Go on Dawn, take him down,” Trina, now my best friend, cheered. My face was red and sweaty, my hair stuck to my face, but that didn’t matter. The only important thing was to wrestle your partner into submission. The boys were surprisingly weak. I threw one boy to the ground with one hand. My feat of strength made my jeans button snap off.
He laughed from the ground, ‘Ha ha, look at her. Her pants snapped open. Ha ha!”
I refused to become embarrassed. What was the point when my face was already fire-engine red from exertion? I calmly buttoned my pants and lunged at him. It wasn’t hard to grab his wrists and make him slap himself in the face as I asked, “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you pinching yourself? Why are you unbuttoning your own pants?”
Though strong as a bull moose, Trina rarely joined in unless someone decided to cheat and attack from me behind. Then she would summon her incredible strength and without rancor grab the boy and deposit him a few metres away. “No ganging up,” she would say and return to watching the match.
We played in shadows cast by the brick walls. That way we didn’t overheat. Also, wrestling was against school policy, but as long as we didn’t make it obvious and didn’t bang into the law abiding students, the teachers were prepared to ignore us. They did not have the energy or the manpower to pull us off one another and send us packing. Once in a while the supervising teacher would walk to the edge of the circle and plaintively ask, “Don’t you know any other games?”
We would stop immediately and stare at her. She would stare back. We would stare harder. She would look away and then move away with that slow, steady walk that every playground supervisor had mastered. Each step took at least a second. Watching the teacher stroll through the playground was almost meditative. I wonder if they taught it in teacher’s college: Recess Walking 101 — How to Create a Sense of Authority with Your Gait.
The Native girls played on the tire fort, which we shared only with the Native boys. Nobody wanted it anyway because it was so dangerous. A girl had broken her arm the year before; it was a bad break that necessitated surgery and pins and ugly stitches. We had all been dragged into the gymnasium for a school assembly on safe play. Afterwards, all the other kids abandoned the tire fort, so we took it over.
The tire fort had a staircase of tires that led to a wooden platform at the top. To get down you had four choices. You could take the slide, slide down a pole, go back down the tire stairs or take the broken arm route.
One day Celeste led a blonde, pretty white girl over to the tire fort. We welcomed her with curious stares.
“What’s your name?”
“Sandy.” She spoke softly.
“Sandy, so . . . ” I wanted to ask her about being white and what it was like and how come she wanted to play with us but it seemed rude to put her on the spot. “Do you wanna play race to the top?” I asked.
She nodded.
It was kind of cool having a white girl hanging out with us. She brightened up the fort. She was also well off which made her and Celeste even more unusual friends.
There was a caste system that everyone on the playground unquestioningly followed. The white girls played with the white girls. The Native girls played with the Native girls. The only exception was the poor white girls who played with us from time to time. Like us, their clothes had seen the inside of a second hand store.
There was an Asian girl and a South Asian girl who went to the school — they played with the white girls. I figured that was because they lived in town. There was one Native girl who went back and forth from the white girls to the Native girls. She was very rich because her dad had won the lottery.
Sandy played with us for a few days. We accepted her as our own, even going so far as to give her a nickname, “the white girl.” Then one day she didn’t come over when the recess bell rang. We saw her across the playground, standing in line for hopscotch. I asked Celeste why she went away. Celeste shrugged. My sister had a lot of friends, what was one less?
Walking through the playground one day, I observed the other clusters of students and noticed the hierarchy. I relayed the theory to Trina who listened to my theories with unquestioning patience. This was an important quality in a best friend.
“I notice that there is prejudice here.”
Trina’s eyes widened. Everyone knew that prejudice was bad. To call someone prejudiced was to say that they hated Indians.
“The rich white kids are at the top. Then next is the poor kids and then at the bottom are the Indian kids.”
“What about the Chinese girl and the East Indian girl?”
They were always screwing up my theories. “Well they’re sort of like white girls aren’t they? They live in town; they go to the same birthday parties. It’s like they are white.”
Trina nodded in agreement. It all made perfect sense to her. Also, she didn’t really care.
Elementary school taught us that we lived in two different worlds. In a classroom setting, the worlds would sometimes bump up against one another. You could not always choose where you sat in a classroom and even if you could choose, inevitably a Native would have to sit next to a white or vice versa. It was simple geometry. Out on the playground where the teachers could not interfere, the separation was complete. They played their games; we played ours.
In the Native student world, people were always coming and going. A girl might show up at the school for a month and then leave, only to be replaced by another girl with new knowledge of the city or a different reserve. I was always curious to hear their stories. They were worldlier than us having lived in the country and in the city.
One year a girl named Cassandra showed up right after Christmas break. She was ten going on thirty. She had both ears pierced, more than once. She wore nail polish and frosted lipstick that she applied every chance she had. She had a boyfriend too, in the city. The city was one of her favourite subjects.
“In the city, there’s like thousands of kids in elementary school. And recess isn’t fifteen minutes, it’s like half an hour.”
“Half an hour? What do you play?”
“We don’t play.” She laughed at my conventionality. “In the city, we just . . . y’know . . . hang out.”
“Hang out? What’s that?”
Cassandra laughed and other girls joined in with her laughter. “It’s . . . y’know . . . hanging out.”
In practice, hanging out turned out to be sitting around on the tire fort talking about boys. In my opinion, hanging out was a giant waste of time. My sister and I were country girls — used to walking wherever we went — and our legs begged to be stretched each recess. Standing next to Cassandra and the girls gathered around her was torture. While they leaned languorously, my legs jiggled nervously.
“Hey, everybody, how a
bout we have a race?”
“Why would we do that?” Cassandra had no interest in being a good runner. Instead she would light a smoke and pass it around the circle of girls who were eager to cast off their country values in favour of city vices.
A few days later, a teacher caught Cassandra smoking in the bathroom and confiscated her smokes. After a few detentions, she sauntered back onto the playground with a new plan for our recess time. She suggested a game of Girls Catch the Boys.
“How do you play that?”
“We run after the boys and then we catch them.”
“And then what?”
“Then you do what you want to them.”
“Like . . . ?” Beat them up? Make them eat dirt? Spit on their faces? There were a lot of possibilities out there, each with a different level of difficulty. I needed to know how to play this game if I was going to win it.
Instead of answering my question, Cassandra raised a plucked eyebrow like a ten-year-old Mae West and smiled. The other girls twittered. I rolled my eyes. They didn’t know either but they didn’t want to look stupid in front of Cassandra.
“Sure sounds like fun.” My voice dripped with fake enthusiasm. How could chasing down smelly boys be any fun? Wouldn’t pushing one another on the swings or having races to the top of the monkey bars be a better use of our time?
Even hopscotch was preferable — and hopscotch was the dumbest thing anyone could do. Hamsters would find hopscotch boring. (A giant wheel, on the other hand, would have kept me busy for months at a time.)
At least you knew when you lost hopscotch — it was when your kneecap fell off. I couldn’t see how a winner could be proclaimed from the game, Girls Catch the Boys. Would it be the girl who caught the most boys? Or the girl who caught the fastest boy?
We did not notify the boys about the game, we just ruthlessly ran them down. One second they were standing in the ball field waiting for a fly ball, the next a group of giggling girls had descended upon them. Once the first boy was captured, the other boys knew to run. And soon they were half way across the sports field.