Close to Spider Man by Ivan E. Coyote

pin.
    So the rest of the strap stuck oddly out from one side of the back of my head, but I didn’t care, because it was my Snap-On-Tools hat that my dad had given me, just handed it right over to me when the guy at the tool place gave it to him, he was buying rivets or concrete pins or something, and the hat said Northern Explosives too, in black block letters in an arch over the hole in the back part, and come to think of it, what I wouldn’t do now for that hat.
    So enough about the hat, this American tourist sees me holding the door open, and of course he assumes it’s for him,so he won’t bump his cameras together pushing past his belly to open it for himself, and he steps through the door, right in front of my mom and her groceries.
    He thanks me down his nose in heavy Texan “Thank you, son,” and sucks more fresh Yukon air through his teeth. He is about to speak to me again, to meet the people, to engage in a little local colour, in the form of a polite little boy, and perhaps, via a patronizing conversation with him, get to meet his lovely young mother, too, who also had my little sister in tow, perpetual snot on her upper lip, even in summer like this.
    My mom interrupts this quaint northern moment, pushing the puffed wheat, two percent, and pork chop-laden cart briskly through the door. “She is not your son,” she shoots out the side of her mouth and the door slams shut behind the surprised Texan. I can’t see him anymore, there is just myself reflected in the dusty glass, and the back of my mom smaller in the background, as she pushed the cart and dragged my little sister to my dad’s Chevy, where he was smoking behind the wheel.
    We could hate the tourists a lot more back then, before the mines all shut down.
    The pavement was so hot in the parking lot that the bottoms of my sneakers stuck to the tar that patched the cracks on the way back to my Dad’s truck.

    April, 1992 † Vancouver, B.C
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    The van was packed when the call came.
    â€œIs this the girl named Ivan?”
    How much can you really guess about a stranger’s voice on the phone, but I listened to the soft, smiling lilt of hers rise and fall as she explained that she had been at a going away party for me the night before, a surprise going away party that my friends threw for me because I was driving up to the Yukon today to work for six months. Except the surprise part of the plan had worked just a bit too well, because what nobody besides myself knew was that I was teaching twelve inmates at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women how to make leather belts all night, and this was the first I had heard about my own party, and it was over. Quite the surprise it was.
    â€œGreat party,” she explained, and the sound of her laugh made me think of leprechauns. “Anyway, I was going to take the bus up to Whitehorse today, and well, how do you feel about some company? I cooked a whole ton of pasta salad for the bus.”
    Now, no amount of gas money and pasta salad can pay for four days on the Alaska Highway with someone who is starting to get on your nerves, because after Prince George you really are in the middle of nowhere, but I liked her voice. I said I’d pick her up in an hour at her sister’s place on my way out of town.

    Of course, driving over, the doubting began. Just me and the open road home – and a perfect stranger. What if she doesn’t smoke, or wants to talk about co-dependency or something like that for two thousand miles? She-ll be so glad she’s not stuck on a Greyhound that she won’t actually say anything; she’ll just silently roll down her window in a disapproving fashion and say things like, “I should give you my therapist’s number. She specializes in addiction issues.”
    But I picked her up, she bungee-Corded her beat-up momitain bike to the roof, loaded in her pasta salad, lit a smoke, and smiled with an elf mouth that