One in Every Crowd by Ivan E. Coyote Read Free Book Online Page B

even cry. You were my hero back then, you know?”
    “Well, I cried when I broke my legs this time. I’m still crying. Some fucking hero I am now, huh?”
    I heard the empty in her voice and didn’t know what to say. So I told her a story.
    “Your old shed is still out behind John’s, you know. Nobody ever goes in there. A couple of years ago John said I should go out and see if your leather tools were still out there. Might as well, since maybe I would use them, and so I did. It was like a time machine in there. Everything was still hanging where you left it.
    “I took down your old bullwhip. It didn’t really want to uncurl, but I played with it a little and it warmed up a bit. I took it outside into the corral and screwed around with it. On about the hundredth try or so, I got it to crack. I got so excited by how it jumps in your hand when you get the roll of the arm right that I hauled off and really let one rip. The end of the whip came whistling past my head, and just the tip of it clipped the back of my ear on the way by, and it dropped me right into the dirt. I was afraid to peel my hand from the side of my head to see if there was still an ear there. Hurt like fuck.
    “But I thought of you and made myself try a bunch more times until I got it to crack again, you know, so I wouldn’t be too afraid next time. Like you would have done.”
    She was quiet for a while on the other end of the line. “You still have some imagination, kid. Always did. You gotta come visit me sometime. I’d love to see what you look like all grown up. I don’t get into Calgary much any more, only when Edward feels like driving, which is never. You’d have to come out here. Carrie could give you directions.”
    I’ve been back to Southern Alberta twice since then, but never made it to Bragg Creek to see Cathy Bulahouski, the Polish cowgirl from Calgary. She can’t ride any more, she told me, and I couldn’t bear to ask her if she had cut off her hair.

Two: Family I Have

Objects in the Mirror
    LAST MONTH I SPENT TEN DAYS AT HOME IN THE YUKON, doing research for a new project. I went through as many family photos as I could lay my hands on: sorting through the magic red bag of memorabilia my Aunt Roberta keeps in her basement and sifting through the gigantic mishmash of memories crammed into a box in my mother’s guestroom closet. My Grandma Pat won the organization award; hers were some of the only photos actually placed in albums, and each album had a glossary of subjects and decades listed on the inside cover in her bold, confident script. I found a citation for drunk driving from the seventies for one of my uncles, not totally out of character for him, but it was issued at ten o’clock in the morning, which was impressive. I unfolded a stiff and stern letter written by the principal of my father’s high school, which would later be my high school, explaining to his parents just why he was going to have to repeat grade ten. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence, he made sure to point out. I found a lot of pictures of me as a kid. Way more than I remember anyone taking at the time.
    There is the one of me with my dad and my Uncle Rob, who are on either end of a broomstick loaded down with lake trout; I am crouching underneath the fish between the two men, blood spattered up to my elbows, proudly holding up a string of grayling. Me in a campground somewhere up north, exploding out of the willows, carrying a giant log of firewood on my back. Me on the first day of grade one, in a line-up with all the other little girls on the block; all the neighbour girls and my little sister are in sparkly new dresses, their chubby knees scrubbed and squishing out of the tops of sparkling white knee socks. I, on the other hand, am wearing blue corduroys, black rubber boots with red-brown toes, and my Davy Crockett fringed buckskin jacket. Me, in my grade two class photo, front-toothless in a plaid shirt, pearly snaps done right up to my chin,