Nobody Cries at Bingo

by Dawn Dumont

  “Tabitha!” I yelled. I found her concerned eyes peering over the pier.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Someone pushed me in!” There is something about stating the obvious that teenagers find hilarious. They broke out into rough laughter on the dock.

  Tabitha helped me out. “It’s not so bad, you’re only half wet.”

  “I want to go home now!” The water and cold air gave my voice an imperious air, which probably reminded the teenagers of all the oppressive figures in their lives: their parents, their teachers, the police, the guy at the arcade who wouldn’t let them drink in the parking lot . . .

  This time it was not a gentle shove. This time it was multiple hands on my legs and arms, throwing me off the dock into the water below. “TABITHA!” I yelled on my way down.

  I was not the only one thrown into the water as someone else took the opportunity to push his little brother in, too. Our heads popped up at the same time. I was on the verge of crying when suddenly he laughed. And then I laughed.

  I got it, finally. “This is what it means not to care,” I thought myself. “This is pure unadulterated fun.” Fortunately I had enough self-awareness not to utter that phrase aloud.

  On the ride home, I sat in the back seat. My sister’s best friend sat in front beside her. They discussed their night, its ups and its downs. I can’t remember what they talked about, it’s not important now, as they’ve settled into families and careers and wouldn’t even remember the boys they laughed about.

  Instead, I remember the red cherry of their cigarette as they passed it between one another. I remember their laughter in between the songs on the radio. I see the way their hair moved in the wind, as it dislodged their hairspray and disturbed their feathered bangs. I recall the smell of their smoke, the way it tunneled out the window as we climbed the hill back to the reserve. I can still hear the hum of the car as I laid my head on the seat. I can feel the rough upholstery up against my pimpled cheek and the rocks underneath the car on the gravel road. I remember feeling safe knowing that it was my older sister driving the car and that she would get us home.

  THE WAY OF THE SWORD

  WHEN I WAS GROWING UP MY HERO was Conan the Barbarian. He wasn’t just a comic book character — Conan was a way of life, a very simple way of life. When Conan wanted something, he took it. When someone stood in his way, he slew them. There were no annoying grey areas when you were a barbarian.

  Uncle Frank introduced me, my siblings and all my cousins to Conan. He arrived from Manitoba one day with a bag filled with clothes and a box full of comics. I was ten and had no idea who Uncle Frank was. “This is your uncle,” Mom said pointing at the thin man with no hair sitting next to her at the table.

  “Yeah, hi, okay,” I said, breezing by as I polished an apple on my T-shirt.

  I would have kept walking had I not overheard the words, “horse ranch.” I stopped short, reversed and sat to my uncle’s right as he laid out the plans for possibly the greatest single thing that has ever happened to the Okanese reserve — Uncle Frank’s ranch.

  Frank had no children but his interests in horses, comic books and candies guaranteed that they would always surround him. From the first day he arrived, all the kids within a three-kilometre radius spent all our free time at Uncle Frank’s — a fact, which delighted our bingo-addicted mothers to no end. When the horses weren’t available, or the weather was inclement or we had stuffed ourselves with too many cookies and potato chips, my cousins and I gathered in Uncle Frank’s living room where we would leaf through his Conan collection. Each week, we’d fight over who got to read the latest issue, but it was just as easy to lose yourself in an old comic while a slow reader mumbled his way through the new one.

  Uncle Frank had hundreds of Conan comics from various different series. You see, Conan led such a long and complex life that it had to be told from several different angles. There was Conan the Barbarian, Conan the King, Young Conan and the Savage Sword of Conan. The Savage Sword was my favourite because it was more of a graphic magazine than a comic book. On these pages, the artists took extra time and care to bring across Conan’s heroic form, stylized muscles and the blood splatters of his foes. These stories were savoured; each word would be read, each panel would be studied, to achieve maximum Conan absorption.

  Every time I opened a new comic, I read the italicized print above the first panel that described the world of Conan, “The proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jewelled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

  Through these magazines we learned all we needed to know about Conan and his life philosophies. There was a recipe for living in those comics: love those who love you and conquer those who don’t. My cousins took this to heart and ran headlong into adventures like chasing down the bantam rooster until he turned on them and flew at their faces with his claws. They emerged from their adventures with bruises, scrapes and confident smiles. I always hung back, afraid of breaking a limb or scratching my smooth, plump skin. I knew I could be like Conan too, but in the distant future, far away from sharp claws and bad tempered chickens.

  Part of the reason we loved Conan was we believed he was Native. The story of Conan mirrored the story of Native people. Conan was a descendent of the Cimmerians, a noble warrior people who made swords yet lived peaceably. They were attacked and annihilated by an imperial army who murdered the men and women and enslaved the children. Conan was one of those children and the only one to survive slavery (according to the movie.) He was the last of his kind.

  This was exactly like our lives! Well, except for the last of our kind business. We were very much alive and well even though others had made a concerted effort to kill us off. Later, I learned that throughout the world, people thought that Indians had been killed off by war, famine and disease. Chris Rock does a comedy bit about this point, claiming that you will never see an Indian family in a Red Lobster. This is a misconception: my family has gone to Red Lobster many times. (However, we are most comfortable at a Chinese buffet.)

  In Saskatchewan, most non-Native people were very much aware that nearly a million Native people still existed, mainly to annoy them and steal their tax dollars.

  But someone had tried to annihilate us and that was not something you got over quickly. It was too painful to look at it and accept; it was easier to examine attempted genocide indirectly. We could read about the Cimmerians and feel their pain; we could not acknowledge our own.

  Once we had owned all of Canada and now we lived on tiny reserves. While reserves weren’t as bad as, say, a slave labour camp run by Stygian priests, sometimes life was reduced to survival. Like Conan, all we had was our swords and our wits. And if we weren’t allowed to bring our swords to school, then we would use our fists. There was an unspoken belief among the Native kids that we would fight to defend our people should anyone decide to annihilate us again. As Conan once said as he incited a group of slaves to overthrow their master, “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees!” I think other people have also said this. Most notably, Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

  My sister Celeste and I made swords out of tree branches and practiced our swordplay in the backyard.

  “Today I’m Conan,” she announced proudly.

  “No you’re the Evil Wizard,” I replied. I refused to be the evil wizard because with my dark hair, brown skin and, well, evil personality, I worried about being typecast.

  “You were Conan yesterday.”

  “That’s because I’m bigger.”

  “No, just fatter.”

  Thunk! Our swords met and the resulting explosion reverberated up our arms. It did not matter that Conan was a man and we were girls; we were all Conan in spirit.

  Besides, in the barbarian world, women were just as good fighters as men. Conan had several
female sidekicks who fought alongside him (and who often became his lovers.) These women usually had long hair, feisty spirits and exceptionally large breasts. Perhaps there was a connection between hefting a sword and breast growth?

  The women were just as much heroes as the men. There was Valeria, who was Conan’s first love. She figured prominently in the Conan the Barbarian movie where her purple prose helped to cover her co-star’s poor English skills.

  Then there was Red Sonja who could not be beaten by any man. A goddess gave Red Sonja’s her fighting powers and attached a powerful price: Red Sonja could never take a man as a lover unless he had bested her in battle first. Needless to say, this was quite a drag on Red Sonja’s sex life. Only Conan connoisseurs will remember his lost loves: Tetra and Belit. Tetra made it through a couple of stories before she died and was reborn as an evil witch who tried to kill Conan. Somehow this experience did not sour Conan on women. He later fell in love with the Pirate Queen Belit. Belit had been a princess whose ship went down. She convinced a group of Kush pirates (who looked a lot like Africans) that she was a goddess and became their leader. Unfortunately as a Goddess, it was tough for her to show her affection for Conan in front of her crew, as a goddess does not have “needs.” I had such regard for Belit and Tetra that I ended up naming two horses after them.

  All of Conan’s girlfriends were warriors like him; he had no place in his life for skinny little chicks that didn’t know how to defend themselves. Conan was very forward thinking for a man who lived in the time before the oceans swallowed Atlantis.

  These warrior women were my role models because they reflected the women in my life. Native women were also warriors though not always by choice. They would show up at the band office on Mondays with black eyes, bruised faces and swollen knuckles and tell stories about heroic battles held the weekend before.

  “Thought he could just come in and kick me around. Well, I showed him a thing or two.”

  “He’ll think twice about bringing the party back to the house next time.”

  “Kicked him in the ass, right between the cheeks. Sure taught him a lesson!”

  Then they would throw back their heads and laugh, sometimes stopping to cough up a little blood.

  From what I could see, Native women were tough as nails. My mom worked anywhere from two to three jobs while looking after all of us plus whichever friend or cousin was staying with us. She changed her own tires and siphoned her own gas. Mom wasn’t much of a warrior in the physical sense. She had a wry sense of humour that evolved from watching conflicts rather than from engaging in them. In her mind, it was better to mock the fools than to be one of them. As long as you could run faster than the fools, that is.

  When my dad would come thundering home after a week long drinking binge, Mom would pack up quickly and stealthily escape through the other door. Then again, stealth is also part of being a warrior. Many were the times when Conan had to run away from an irate King after sleeping with the wrong Queen.

  At school, Natives were assigned the role as the ass-kickers. Even if you were a girl, you were expected to be as tough as a boy. And if you grew up on a reserve, you were doubly tough. In grade one when the girls in the class decided to punish the boys, they enlisted my help as the only Native girl in the class. “You’re tough, Dawn. Go beat up Matt; he’s being mean to us,” they cooed into my ear.

  How did they know I was tough? I wondered. I’d never fought anyone in the class; I’d never fought anyone outside of my immediate family. Perhaps they could sense the Cimmerian blood pumping through my veins.

  Or maybe it was just that they saw the way the older Native girls punished one another in the schoolyard. They would throw down their jackets and pull out their long, dangling earrings, and run at each other with abandon. We’d make a ring around them so that they could have their privacy. Then we’d chant “fight, fight, fight!” so that they had proper motivation. The fighters would punch, pull hair, scratch, whatever it took to get the other girl down to the ground. For boys, that might be enough. For these girls, the loser not only had to fall to the ground, she had to stay down. And unlike the boys, these fights didn’t end with good-natured handshakes.

  My first fight happened when I was ten years old. I was outside of a bingo hall with my brother and sister and older cousins. We were playing on the playground equipment when a thin Native girl and her thin brother claimed the swings next to us. The two groups warily watched each other, each labeling the other group as outsiders.

  My cousins were a few years older than me and a lot more foolish. When the little boy started to throw rocks at us, they devised a special punishment for him. They instigated a fight between his sister and me. I knew that this was not a good idea. The girl had not done anything to me and I had done nothing to her. It offended my barbarian sense of justice.

  Darren, my older cousin, took me by the shoulders and explained the reasons why the girl needed to be beat down. “It’ll be fun!”

  I didn’t want to fight, but I had to. As a Cimmerian, you couldn’t back down. At that time my motto for life was, “What would Conan do?”

  The girl was taller than me and had long legs. I remember this quite clearly because she kicked me in the face about five times in quick succession. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. Her long legs flashed as they rose up to meet my head.

  She did not vanquish me. As she tattooed my face with the bottom of her shoe, I managed to keep moving forward, mostly out of confusion. Once I got close enough, I employed my natural hair-pulling ability. I was the hair-pulling champ of my family and I often bragged that I knew seventy-five different ways to pull hair.

  We ended up getting pulled apart by a security guard. I was crying. My opponent was crying, although I couldn’t understand why since I had clearly gotten my ass handed to me. I suppose even Conan cried after his first fight.

  My cousins hurriedly escorted me to their house. They cheered my exploits and flattered my fighting style in the hopes that I wouldn’t tell on them. They didn’t have to worry; I had no intention of reliving the battle any time soon. I excused myself to the washroom and examined my battle scars. There was a little blood under my nose and my lip was puffy and had its own heartbeat.

  As I washed the blood off my face, my hands shook. Even though I was no longer in danger, the memory of the fight hummed through my body. I could not relax and felt like puking. I never wanted to fight again. That desire was incompatible with my love of Conan and with being a Native woman. By Crom, I’d be coming to this bridge again and next time I would be prepared!

  I vowed that from now until my next fight, I would train every day. Like when Conan was kidnapped from Cimmeria and sold as a slave to the gladiators, I would train to be a warrior. Every night, to increase my strength, I would do push-ups, wall-sits and take out the garbage. I would beg my parents to enroll me in martial arts classes where I would find a sensei who would mold me into an unstoppable force. I would watch kung fu movies and practice the moves on my siblings.

  Several years passed, in which I did nothing to prepare for my next bloody entanglement except read more Conan magazines. My next fight occurred in the seventh grade. There were many bullies at my school that year: older girls who gave you the mean eye and who looked for reasons to exercise their already honed fighting skills, and younger girls looking to establish themselves as “toughs.” There were even aspiring Don Kings who went about their day trying to promote fights among the girls.

  One of the tough older girls decided that I had called her a bad name and she stalked me in the hallways for weeks. Her name was Crystal and she was three years older than me. She was a single mom bravely going back to school to make something of herself for her child. She kept getting distracted by her frequent smoke breaks, make out sessions with the bus driver and her love of terrorizing the younger girls.

  Crystal wasn’t extraordinarily big or muscular but she was rumoured to be a fierce and merciless fighter. She wore a lot of makeup
and had a feathery haircut tailored to hide her acne-scarred forehead.

  I became aware of her dislike for me gradually. It took me awhile to figure out that someone would distinguish me from my group of shy friends. So Crystal had to make it clear. When I walked past her and her group leaning against the lockers, she whispered to them and they erupted in laughter. When I offered a nervous smile in their direction, they laughed louder.

  When my group walked outside the smoker’s door to make our way downtown for lunch, she spit inches from my feet.

  In the hallways she stepped past me and pushed me with her shoulder as she did. At first I thought she was just clumsy but when she knocked me into the wall and did not pause to see if I was okay or even say “excuse me,” I suspected it was personal.

  “Umm . . . Crystal . . . are you angry with me?” I asked her, one afternoon. I was nervous. Still I managed to keep my voice relatively normal. However, I had no idea what to do with my hands. They moved around me as I spoke, settling on my hips for a second before migrating towards my tummy.

  Crystal pressed her chest up against mine. I took a step back, partly from fear, partly from a natural aversion to touching boobs with another woman.

  “Yeah, I am. Got a problem with that?”

  “No. Well, yes. I mean you can have a problem with me if you want to . . . .” Was that my voice sounding like I’d sucked back a litre of helium? I cleared my throat. “I guess I’m just wondering, what did I do?”

  “You know,” she snarled.

  I looked around at the people watching our exchange. A crowd of teenagers had gathered, attracted to the smell of conflict. Everyone seemed to be glaring and shaking his or her head at me. “Yes, she is exactly the type of person who would do something and then pretend like she didn’t know,” their accusatory eyes said.