Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson Page B

his shoulder, frizzing where it was loose from his braid. Staying in the water, he half-swam, half-bobbed towards me. He leaned against the rocks. “Pretty cool, huh?”
    I nodded. “I wish I could live with you.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “You’re fun. They never let me have any fun.”
    Mick sucked in a deep breath. He swam over to his clothes and shook out a cigarette. He came back dog-paddling with his head tilted out of the water, cigarette in his mouth, his braid trailing behind him.
    “Your mom and dad are fun too,” Mick said.
    I gave him a doubtful look.
    “They are. But with you, they have to do parent things. They have to keep you fed and clothed and pay the bills and watch out for you. That kind of stuff. We can just hang out like this. You understand?”
    “Yeah. You don’t want me either.”
    He flicked some water at me.
“Na’
. What a mood.”
    I wiped the water from my face. My hands were going all white and wrinkly. “I want to be like you. I don’t want to stay here and be all boring.”
    “Mmm. You might want to think that over.”
    “I want to be a warrior.”
    “A warrior, huh?”
    “I do! I don’t care what you think.”
    His smile faded. “Fighting didn’t get me anything but lots of scars.”
    “But you did things!”
    “For all the good it did,” he said, poking me in the side. He finished the cigarette, let it hiss to death in the water, then flicked it out one of the small windows. “Okay, let me tell you a secret. You want to hear a secret?”
    I shrugged, disappointed that he hadn’t reacted more enthusiastically to my revelation.
    “When your mom and dad went on their first real date, he invited her over for a few drinks. He had to go across to get some beer and got stuck in a snowstorm in town. He had to wait for the snowplow to go back to the village, and meanwhile, your mom was so nervous that she bummed some booze off her friends and was waiting for him at his house, getting royally pissed.”
    “Bullshit,” I said, having never seen Mom even tipsy.
    “Cross my heart,” Mick said. “But she got tired of waiting for him and went home. He tried to phone her when he got back, but she said she was beat and wet and wanted to go to sleep. The next morning, your ma-ma-oo came home and asked him who made the snow angels. Your dad went to the window, and the whole front yard was covered with them. Your mom doesn’t even remember making them, that’s how toasted she was. ‘That’s when I knew I was going to marry her,’ your dad told me.”
    It didn’t sound like them at all. I thought Mick was mixing them up with two completely different people, and I said so.
    “You can ask them,” Mick said. “Go ahead.”
    “No way. They’d kill me.”
    “Blackmail material,” Mick said with a wink.
    We had a lot of time on our hands. Mom had said that she wanted to reach Kemano before us, so we hung out at the springs. Mick got out first, sitting on the edge of the tub, lighting another cigarette. He chain-smoked. I don’t think there was a moment when I saw him without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. When he lifted his arm, I couldsee the pale scar along his side where the bullet had grazed his ribs.
    After hanging out at the hot springs, we toweled off and Mick had another smoke. I hunted between the logs on the beach for shells, but didn’t find any. About noon, we went back to the crab traps. When he pulled up the first crab trap, he whooped, delighted. It was so full, there were crabs clinging to the outside. “Ready to jump in our pot!”
    The crabs skittered on the bottom of the boat. We put them in buckets. I hated the sound of their claws rasping on the plastic. I hated the way Mom and Dad cooked them, the way they rattled against the pot as they were boiled to death. I liked it best when Mick cooked them because he stuck a knife through their bodies first, one quick thrust.
    The next crab pot and the next were full too. Mick began to