Falling Backwards: A Memoir (16 page)

Sue and I stood there looking at each other in disbelief. I was inches away from being squashed between a wooden pole and a large four-door vehicle moving at fifty miles an hour. People came running from the house next door trying to figure out what had happened. The poor guy had had a heart attack behind the wheel and lost control of his car. He was clutching his chest and muttering, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry …” While everyone waited for the ambulance, I wondered if he was going to die. His wife, who had been in
the passenger seat, had a bloody nose that looked a lot worse than it probably was. She was staggering around with her purse dangling off her arm. God forbid she should lose that purse! After the ambulance drove them to the hospital, Sue and I wandered home with our fishing rod, still in shock. It was one of the most exciting and frightening things that had ever happened in Bragg Creek. We never did find out if that guy died. He was still moaning when they hauled him off, and we assumed that was a good sign.

In bed later that night, I cried for an hour, replaying everything in my mind. I don’t think I realized how close I had come to dying. It was nothing more than a split second that could have changed everything about my existence. Sue never did whack me back with that fishing pole. I guess she figured being almost hit by a car was payback enough.

Sue was so much fun to be around. Her parents lived in a real log cabin that her dad had built, and I thought that that was completely fantastic. It looked like a quaint little pioneer home that Hutterites would have lived in, only edgier. The people in this log house smoked and drank.

Sue’s folks sold antiques and ran the local postal outlet, among other things. Sue’s mom was a landscape painter. She’d sit in the post office part of their house and paint these amazing mountain scenes. The oil paint looked edible and, believe me, I was tempted. I had never seen anybody paint a real honest-to-God painting before, and I was completely entranced. Someday I wanted to do that too.

Sue’s dad always had a pipe hanging out of his mouth, and he liked to drink whisky. (I think he may have been drunk all the time, but I never knew what he looked like sober so I never actually figured that out.) He hardly ever spoke a word to any of us. He grunted and waved his hands a lot. I was kind of afraid of him. Sue told me that her dad was Scottish and that’s why he was the way he was, whatever
that meant. His hands were as big as baseball mitts, and they were riddled with scars and cuts and gouges. Not only had he built their log house, but he built log houses for a living, and his hands reflected every single hour he put into building them. Sue’s parents seemed like hippies but I knew they weren’t. They marched to their own band, that’s for sure.

Sue was one of six girls. Her mother had two sets of twins. I often thought that her dad must have shaken his Scottish head back and forth every time another girl popped out of his wife. You’d think a Scottish man would have pined for a son. If he did, we never heard him say anything about it. He’d just sit at his wooden kitchen table (which he’d made himself) with billows of smoke gathering over his head. He’d flick the newspaper, peer over its pages, and ask us if we had anything better to do. I guess that meant, get your asses out of my house and go play. He did it with a glint in his eye; even though he was kind of scary, he smiled with his eyes all the time. He tugged on the braid down the back of my head once, and I took that as a sign that he actually liked me.

One day Sue and I puffed away on his old pipe until we both turned green. It was like eating a half-burned log dipped in kerosene. I tried to throw up but nothing would come out. My eyes just watered madly and I stood hunched over in the trees, feeling foolish for having tried smoking at all. Sue was so afraid that we’d get caught that we made sure to put everything back just so. We wiped the pipe down for prints, and we fluffed up the tobacco in the pouch so it looked full. Her dad had a temper that we didn’t want to trigger under any circumstances. We both hoped our cover-up job was professional. I vowed to not smoke again until college.

Bragg Creek was like the Canadian version of the Ozark Mountains, complete with the distant strains of banjos. I think there were a few
folks out there whose parents may have been cousins. I won’t name any names, but there were some interesting sets of teeth for sure. Bragg Creek had one decrepit little gas station that had a single, old, rusted gas pump and an ancient pop machine that froze solid in the winter. There was one kind of gas—
very
leaded—and two kinds of pop, if you were lucky. The machines had glass bottles that pulled up through metal sleeves. I remember drinking Orange Crush or Dad’s Root Beer. A bottle of Crush cost twenty-five cents and made my entire mouth orange for several hours. The store also sold a small selection of penny candy so it was the place to hang out for sure.

Gene Fullerton and his wife, Eva, owned and operated the gas station and also bootlegged beer and an odd assortment of hard liquor out the back door. Everybody knew what was going on. It didn’t matter if you were fourteen or ninety-seven, you could buy alcohol from Gene and Eva.

Gene was a big man with a red face and his wife was like a barrel with legs. They both looked like you could roll them down a hill and they’d be none the worse for wear. Gene combed his hair from one side of his head right over to the other, like those thirty-five strands of hair would disguise what was actually going on up there. He had beady little eyes, the whites suffused with red veins screaming out for oxygen. He also had what they called a gin blossom growing off the end of his nose. It looked like a mangled lump of purple cauliflower. My mom told me people got them from drinking too much. I would find myself staring at his nose whenever I saw him. He always smelled like whisky and his wife, well, she did too. Eva wore the same muumuu-type dress for years. She swayed from side to side when she walked, but never spilled a drop of whatever she was drinking. I remember her having one big tooth in her head that stuck out under her top lip, and I mean one tooth. I don’t know why she decided to keep just that one. I’d see her out in her yard
with that dress on, holding her red plastic cup. Sue said she drank rye and Seven. I had never heard of rye and Seven. It sounded weird.

There was something so melancholy about that pair. They certainly weren’t unkind people—in fact, they were endlessly jovial; just drunk, that’s all. They had all these wild kids who drank like crazy too. All you had to do was mention the name Fullerton and people knew it meant trouble. All their boys dropped out of school very early on and just drank themselves half to death. They were so young and good-hearted, but alcohol ruined their lives. They were simply born with an addiction. Sometimes people come through the veil already saddled with problems. It’s just a theory, mind you, but that’s the way it seems. My mom would often say that the Fullerton kids didn’t have a chance from the word go.

Gene and Eva sat there and watched their entire family just drown in booze. First the man he takes the drink, and then the drink he takes the man—my dad always said that. My dad was a drinker, but he didn’t look like Gene Fullerton. My mom told me that people didn’t always look like drunks even when they were. Some can blend in and seem normal for the most part. I think my dad was one of those people. He blended in, he seemed normal, his drinking seemed invisible—except that my mom could see him and Duray could see him and I could see him. I hoped my dad would never end up with a gnarled purple chunk of cauliflower on the end of his nose.

Sue and I got beer from Gene once in awhile. He charged twenty bucks for a case of beer, which was outrageous back then. It was more than double what a case of beer went for in town, but he knew he had you over a barrel. By the time you were buying liquor from Gene Fullerton, you were probably half in the bag and desperate to keep the party going. Sue and I would buy a case, go down to the river and laugh our fool heads off. We certainly didn’t drink an entire case, but we’d each have a bottle and maybe split a third. The rest we
hid in the bushes for the next time we were down there. Somebody always found those bottles of beer and drank them and we were pretty sure we knew who it was: the Fullerton boys.

We occasionally played spin the bottle with one or two of the Fullerton boys. They were always up for anything so we figured, why not? They were kind of cute when they were young. They had pretty good teeth, too. Why kissing anybody on the lips for a one-one thousand count was such a big deal, I will never understand. There certainly wasn’t a tongue in sight, so it was all pretty tame. We’d watch the river gurgle past us and sit around a bonfire kissing each other or daring each other to do silly things. We’d become bored of it all fairly quickly and just move on to skipping stones or melting the bottom of our shoes on the fire. I still enjoyed a good fire.

Sometimes Sue and I would take some of our bootlegged beer and go to dances at the Bragg Creek community hall, where we’d see Theresa and our other friends. (I may have stolen change from the bottom of my mom’s purse from time to time to do this.) My parents didn’t know if I was out late because I was staying the weekend in Bragg Creek with Sue’s family and they knew that Sue and I were harmless—which we were—and that we didn’t go out of our way to find trouble. Sue’s parents didn’t have a curfew of any kind and maybe didn’t worry about us because the community hall was a thousand yards from their front door. Sue was very much like me, and I think that’s why we got along so well. We were mischievous, not stupid.

There was always a live band playing bad country songs at the community dances. Everybody knew everybody so we were pretty much assured a fun night. All the dancing enticed everybody to drink their body weight in beer. It was fun watching people whirl around the worn-out hardwood floors, drunker than skunks and dancing with such reckless abandon. Dancing makes people thirsty. It never failed that they would run out of booze before the dance came to an
end, and that caused problems. The organizers always seemed amazed that people could drink that much and still be standing. There would most certainly be a fist fight or two and then handshakes afterwards implying that there were no hard feelings. It was usually the Fullertons punching it out with each other anyway.

I wasn’t much of a dancer, not that anybody ever asked me to dance. I pretty much stood by the wall watching everybody else stumble about. Theresa would usually be the one to rescue me from my “wallfloweryness.” She was wallflowery herself. In a pinch we would dance together. Sue was always asked to dance. The boys were crazy about her and I could see why. She had a face like a cherub and her freckles were like stars on her face and she was confident. She had the fellas lined up all night long. She was like cute little flame holding court with a bunch of homely, hairy moths.

At the end of the night there were always four or five busted-up chairs and a couple of broken tables. There were broken windows, broken bottles and puddles of vomit scattered about. Someone always seemed to back into the hall with a pickup truck and take off a good chunk of the wood siding. We didn’t miss very many dances, or “dos,” as my mom would call them. The community hall threw them every three or four months. It took them that long to make the various repairs on the building.

Of course everybody got into their trucks and drove off with one eye shut to make sure they were on the right side of the road. I think drinking and driving was what pretty much everybody did back then. I don’t think I’d heard of a DUI until the eighties. It wasn’t a big deal, although it should have been. Nobody I knew was ever pulled over for drinking and driving. I am amazed that my dad was never pulled over. I am amazed that I was never pulled over. Well, sort of …

One night when I was tipsy and driving home too slowly, probably swerving back and forth (ever so slightly), I did in fact get
pulled over. I saw the red and blue lights crawl up beside me and I thought my heart was going to explode. I had been drinking but I didn’t think I was too drunk to be driving. (Everybody thinks they’re fine to drive.) The officer asked me how much I had had to drink and I told him the truth—that I didn’t exactly know. It was probably a couple of glasses of draft beer. I don’t remember him asking me for my driver’s licence or anything like insurance or registration. He told me that I probably shouldn’t be driving around this late at night by myself, that it was dangerous. So believe it or not the police officer drove me home! There I was, in the back of an RCMP police cruiser, heading towards the open arms of my understanding, loving parents. God help me.

We left my locked car sitting on the side of a gravel road. The cop told me to make sure I picked it up the next morning, because he did not want to drive down that road the next day and find it still parked there. I told him that, yessir, the car would
not
be there! I prayed that he wasn’t going to talk to my mom and dad. So far I had gotten away with near murder. I knew they would be asleep but my mother could be awoken by a bird on the windowsill so I knew I needed a miracle—another miracle.

I made small talk all the way home about the dance and who was there and how much fun it was. I don’t think I ever shut up. The poor guy just kept saying “Uh-huh” and “Oh yeah?” I was probably driving him crazy. He brought me right to our front door and said, “There you go.”
There you go?
I just hopped out. He told me to have a good night. It was twenty after two in the morning. Good grief, I thought to myself, as I crept in through the unlocked back door as quietly as humanly possible. Inside everything was dark and still. Would I be ambushed by my mother shining a large flashlight in my face, and questioned until sunrise? I couldn’t believe my luck—my parents were actually sound asleep.

The washer and dryer were right at the door when you came in, so I took off all my smelly beer clothes and washed away any evidence of a good time. I felt so relieved and so guilty all at once. My parents never found out about that little incident, thanks be to God, the giver of all miracles. I might well have been killed if I’d ended up in the slammer. In fact, the slammer would have been my preference over facing the wrath of my father. My experience with the police was obviously a lot different from my older brother’s. They drove me home but they ran him over.