Close to Spider Man by Ivan E. Coyote Page A

matched her leprechaun laugh as she surveyed my van and said:
    â€œSo if she breaks down, I guess I’ll just double you the rest of the way on my bike.”
    Three nights later, in a campground somewhere just outside of Fort Nelson, she slipped her tongue into my ear and her right hand into my Levi’s and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this since we left Kitsilano.”
    Six months later, I drove back to Vancouver to go to electrical school, and she stayed. She had met a sweet-faced French-Canadian boy who I thought looked like Leif Garrett, and she was, unbeknownst to all of us at the time, pregnant with their first son.
    â€œYou gonna write me, Chris?” I asked her as we loaded the last of my stuff back into my van.
    â€œProbably not, but I’ll think about you whenever I eatpasta salad, and if that’s not love, then I’ve never been in it.”
    This is the closest thing to a commitment you will ever get from a leprechaun, and I knew this at the time.
    â€ 
    November, 1998 † Whitehorse, Yukon
    It is a balmy November day at Chriscabin, about three below zero and still no snow. The grass is frost-frozen, sparkling under a sun that shines, not cold, but heatlessly, if there is such a word.
    Chris wants to get the kids together and dressed and go into town, about a half-hour drive in a four-by-four. You could still make the road right now in a car, but not after a good snowfall.
    I haven’t seen Frances, her middle son, since he was a babe in arms. He is now three, and his red brown curls and round face were the first thing I saw at six this morning, when I was still scotch and cigarette sandpaper-mouthed. He pulled the covers off my face and pronounced in a matter-of-fact falsetto: “I’m not sure who you are, but could you help me out?” His one hand still held the end of the sleeping bag up, and his other hand held a strip of toilet paper, which trailed across the cabin floor and into the cold storage room where I assumed he’d just performed his morning’s first production.

    Because Frances performs everything. He has just pranced out of his and his brother’s bedroom, in a pair of emerald and blue-striped tights, red wool socks, and what looks like part of a sleeve from his dad’s old orange sweater stretched up and over his chest, like a tube top.
    â€œDat dah da dahhh . . .” sliding in his socks on the bare floor, his smile flits and then disappears, and he comes to a full halt in front of Chris.
    â€œFrances. Warmer clothes. It’s minus three.”
    His shoulders drop like sandbags, and he stomps, his censored artist head down, back to wardrobe, to change. Thirty seconds later, sliding socks and all, he is back out for act two, but with a purple hippie scarf he is whirling around his neck and twirling . . . his red socks making circles and figure eights, he knows no fear of slivers. . . .
    â€œA sweater. For chrissakes, Frances, don’t you want to go into town with Ivan?”
    Again with the shoulders, and eventually he is forced to compromise his ensemble altogether and submit to a sweater, and a toque as well. I know how he feels – nobody wears a toque and a tube top at the same time, and then to have to cover it all with a sweater?
    â€œWhat do you think of my three-year-old drag queen, Ivan?” Chris asks me like she is showing me a brand new old car she just bought with her own money. She thinks that he will be my favourite because he is . . . well, just like me, andI always thought it would be Emile, because he was the first, and because I was inside of her when he was in her belly and when she came I felt him kick and knew the magic of him then. And then there was Gailon, too, and my mom said Chris told her in the truck one day that it was too late for an abortion with him, and that Chris cried when the midwife handed her her third boy, that makes four boys now and her, alone in the cabin, and she knew