Nobody Cries at Bingo (29 page)

A few years later, my sister and I were outside a bingo hall again when my next battle occurred. We were teenagers and had the teenage ability to walk through the middle of town without supervision, which suited my mom and us just fine. My sister and I had escaped from the front door of the bingo hall as three Native girls were going in. “Excuse me,” I said politely.

“Why? Did you fart?” retorted one of the girls. It was an old diss, one that I had even used myself on occasion.

However instead of dismissing it as such, I rose to the bait. “Maybe you're smelling yourself,” I shot back and kept walking.

My sister and I thought nothing of the encounter as we returned to our conversation, which I am sure was about boys.

We reached our destination, the local arcade. Celeste set up shop in front of a Pac Man game. Celeste was a better than average player and could spend an hour on a single quarter. I stood beside her; my lack of hand-eye coordination had forced me to give up on video games years before. Kimmy, a friend of ours, jogged over when she saw us. “Your mom at bingo?” she asked.

We nodded.

“Yeah, I've been here since this afternoon — it's laundry day.” The laundromat was directly across from the bingo hall.

I made room for Kimmy next to the Pac Man machine. She easily slid between two video games. Like my sister, Kimmy was a long stripe of a girl. When I walked between the two of them, it looked like two giraffes were being taken for a walk by a hobbit. Kimmy and I watched as Celeste decimated the ghost population of the Pac Man game.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and saw a young boy standing there.

“My sister wants to fight you,” he pointed over his shoulder at a group of girls. My eyesight wasn't the best especially as I refused to wear glasses in an attempt to make my parents get me contact lenses. As a result, the group of girls could have been anywhere from four to twenty depending on their individual size and breadth. All I knew from gazing at their amorphous hateful mass was that they did not like me.

My heart immediately began to pound. It was the age-old fight or flight response kicking in. In my case, it was more flight than fight. I wanted to run out of the arcade back to the bingo hall and cower next to my mom. My pride and the tightness of my jeans prevented that.

I cleared my throat as it had suddenly become thickened with fear. “Tell her I am not afraid to face her on the field of battle; that I will not lie down and allow her bullish stock to rule the world; that here on earth there remain a precious few who will stand up for what is right, what is strong and what is pure.”

He rolled his eyes at the tremor in my voice. “When?”

“Anytime, anyplace.”

“Can you pick one?”

“She's the one who wants to fight. She can make the arrangements.”

He sighed and returned to his sister's side. I turned back to the Pac Man game and pretended to be calm.

“What was that about?” Celeste asked.

“Some girl wants to fight me,” I replied casually as if I fought every day, while inside, my colon and spine were melting. Celeste and Kimmy nodded as if they, too, were approached to fight every day of their lives.

My mind began to analyze the situation with military precision. Numbers? Unknown. Fighting arena? Unknown. Fighting strength? Limited. Courage? Too low to gauge. I looked at my two compatriots. “If this girl doesn't fight fair — and it isn't likely that she will — then I will need one or both of you to step in.”

Celeste nodded nonchalantly as her Pac Man feasted on another ghost. Kimmy looked slightly less sure.

“I don't know if my mom would like me to fight.”

I ignored this. “Can each of you handle two girls? I mean I can handle three, I'm bigger than you two.”

Sure, they nodded. Their body language seemed to say that they were almost insulted to be asked that question. However, their eyes shifted back and forth as if they could escape from their heads and therefore from this situation.

I looked around the arcade. It was filled with fifty or so young people and a harried looking middle-aged man. Like me, he surveyed the youth and looked as though he was seriously reconsidering his life choices. Why an arcade? Why not just sell drugs? He shook his head and returned his gaze back to the TV where nubile women danced through music videos. I looked around at the youth, my colleagues and saw my future. Within this group, my future boyfriend, best friend or enemy could be standing in front of an arcade game. These were my peers and in these last few minutes I realized how lucky I was to have them. Fear had made me sentimental.

The boy returned. “She said she'll meet you outside in ten minutes.”

“Whatever,” I answered, as my heart rate went from zero to sixty. I looked at my back up.

Kimmy's eyes flashed towards the exit sign. “Maybe we need another person.”

“There's no time,” I replied. If it were possible to hold onto her sleeve and hold her in place, I would have done so. But experience had taught me that you could not restrain people into being your friends.

“My cousin might be at the laundromat.” Then before I could stop her, Kimmy slid away from us and scurried out of the arcade.

My sister dragged her gaze away from the Pac Man game. Our shared glance communicated everything: we were fucked.

It was two against six or seven or even eight. I'd been in one other fight and Celeste had never fought anyone except for our younger brother and me. My hair pulling techniques were effective against my sister but how effective would they be against someone who didn't know the rule about not hitting in the face?

Celeste and I had no way of knowing how this battle might escalate. I knew that even if it was tough we could handle it. Now if only my hands would stop shaking and my bowels would stop gurgling.

Pregnant woman have told me that the anticipation of pain is always the worst part. I mentally played out scenes from the Savage Sword of Conan. Conan fought men bigger than him all the time and he was never afraid. He jumped in with both feet and his meaty fists raised. I clenched my own fist. It was not meaty. In fact, I could see the blood vessels below the skin, the outline of my slender bones, and covering it all, my smooth, unscarred skin. Such beautiful skin.

My sister continued playing her game. Her self-possession was to be admired. I stood beside her wracking my brain for some way to fix this problem. I was a nerd in school; surely I could make my brain find a non-violent solution to this problem? My brain seemed to disagree.

Perhaps I could walk outside and juggle a few rocks. This would show them that not only was I talented, I was also funny. If only I'd learned to juggle!

Perhaps I could put my oration skills to the test: “Must we fight, my Native sister, when the world has been fighting us for so long?! I say, let us unite against the world.” Somehow I knew that would invite a more vicious beating.

Perhaps I could pretend that I was a felon with dangerous fists. “I can't fight you. If I do, the police will lock me up and throw away the key. I'll kill you and not even notice. My fist is registered as a dangerous weapon on six different reserves. I can't tell you which, otherwise I'd have to kill you.”

Ten minutes later, my sister and I looked at each other and walked towards the exit. Let it never be said that the Dumont girls were ever late for a fight. Our residential school grad parents had ingrained punctuality into us. Though they might fight over everything else, my parents were never late for anything.

Celeste and I stood on the sidewalk. My fists were already clenched in anticipation of the brawl. A group of girls stood twenty metres in front of us. I had trouble making out their features in the light cast by the dim neon lights of the arcade.

“How many girls are there? Six?” I asked Celeste, under my breath.

“There's eight,” she replied.

“Eight!” my voice squeaked out.

Then one girl stepped out in front of the group. She was little more than a blur to me; I got the sense of long dark hair and square shoulders.

“You ready to fight?” my enemy drawled. Her voice came out loud and brash.

“I'm ready.” My voice sounded thin and shaky, like it had been drawn through a hose.

The girl and her friends laughed. “You sound scared. You wanna call this off?”

This was my chance. I could back down now, make a silly joke and walk away as if nothing had ever happened. Yes, people would mock me but who cared what every teenager within a hundred kilometres of my house thought of me. It's not like I was Miss Popular. I could stay inside for the remainder of my teen years and then move to New York City when I turned eighteen where nobody knew that I had cowardly backed down from a fight.

But I couldn't walk away. I had ten years of Conan flowing through my veins. Each comic book, each violent storyline, each panel had laid out my future. I was a fighter and fighters fight.

“I want to fight,” I said firmly. My voice was still high and reedy but at least my eyes were not tearing up.

The girl and her back up fighters approached Celeste and me. “Remember,” I whispered to Celeste, “you have to let them hit you first otherwise you can be charged with assault.” This was an urban legend currently circulating among teenagers.

“Fuck that. I'm kicking them as soon as they get close.”

Celeste and I held our ground. If we were American history students, one of us would have whispered, “Not until we see the whites of their eyes.” For myself, I was going to wait until the girl was within hair-pulling distance. Hopefully, this one would not know how to kick.

As the girls got closer, my heart rate began to slow as if readying itself for the battle that was ahead of us. It was almost as if my body knew what to do. I can do this, I thought to myself just as a deep voice rang through the air.

“Hey!”

Every eye turned towards the right. In the doorway of the laundromat there stood a tall, dark-haired woman. Her long black hair outlined a tough masculine face — it was as though a Cimmerian woman had been transported through space and time to the streets of this Saskatchewan valley-town.

“You girls want trouble?” She crossed the distance from the laundromat in two steps with her tree trunk legs. I had no idea which side she was on until she came to stand in front of my sister and me. She stared into the face of my enemy. My enemy stared back with widening eyes.

In a low, quiet voice our Cimmerian growled, “Which one of you has a problem with my cousin?”

It might have been the timbre of her voice, the muscles in her biceps or the confidence with which she held herself that made all eight girls take a step backwards.

The lead girl sought to save her dignity. “Not your cousin, just this girl,” she said pointing at me. I had no idea what was going on. I wasn't even sure who this barbarian woman was. I hoped we were related.

“They're all my cousins,” the Cimmerian shot back.

“Yeah, all right,” my enemy nodded as if they had made a deal that was to her liking. She backed away into her crowd. They absorbed her and as a group they went back into the arcade.

My sister and I stared at our unknown hero. Kimmy skipped out of the laundromat. “This is my cousin, Freda.”

What do you say to someone who has saved you from a beating? Who has saved your ego, personal dignity and facial skin — three things that are invaluable to teenage girls?

“Hey,” I said awkwardly. Celeste hung back shyly.

Freda barely acknowledged us as she gave her cousin a quick lecture. “You girls shouldn't be fighting,” she said as she wandered back into the laundromat to finish folding her laundry. I'm sure she had no idea of what she'd done for us. In her eyes, this was a silly, pre-teen drama, one of many that would play themselves out on that street that night.

It was life changing for me. I knew at that moment that I would never be a warrior. If there were girls like Freda out there, my fighting career was over before it had begun. Even having someone like Freda on your side was frightening. Perhaps you could learn to resemble a Cimmerian but that was nothing compared to actually being one.

My sister and I headed back to the bingo hall where we sat beside our mom and harassed her into buying us junk food. We never discussed our adventure. Not because we were secretive — I certainly wasn't. Relating my adventures to my mom was one of the highlights of my day. I couldn't tell her this story because there was no way of telling the story that would make me look good.

Perhaps Conan was not the right hero for me. Perhaps I needed a mentor who offered a peaceful alternative, someone who did not need to prove their worth by separating a man's limbs from his body or a woman's hair from her head. There was one epic character who was currently dominating my thoughts at this time: a man who fought, not with a sword, but with great stick-handling skills; a man who would not be drawn into battle, but would only skate faster than the men who sought to bring him down; a man who defeated his enemy with goals rather than with landed punches. Swiftly my mantra changed from what would Conan do, to what would Wayne Gretzky do? Now all I had to do was learn how to skate.

T
HE
L
ONG
R
OAD TO
F
REEDOM

I
REALIZED BY THE AGE OF TEN THAT
I could never have a social life if I didn't learn to drive. We lived on the reserve where houses were miles apart and it didn't matter how much you liked walking or how good you were at it, you could not reach a cute guy's house before the coyotes started howling. Our closest neighbours were half a mile away and they were our relatives and worse, not cute guys, just Jolene and Adelle, a pair of sisters about same age as my sister and me.

We took turns travelling the distance; we walked across the road, down the horse path, into the corral, and then, finally, squeezed ourselves through the electric fence. That last obstacle always put a little spring in your step after the long walk. Once we reached our destination, we lamented about the lack of fun things to do on the reserve. “Someday,” I said, “we will have guys coming to OUR houses to pick us up.” Nobody believed that, not even me. We would have to learn to drive or else resign ourselves to setting up a sewing circle.