Too Close to the Falls (2 page)

Roy and I made up complicated systems for working together efficiently. He threw magazines to me. I printed “Return” on them if they were past a certain date, threw them on the bright red upright dolly, and we whipped out to pile them on the return truck when it beeped. I always rode on top of the magazines and Roy pushed the dolly, tearing around corners of the store. (We set an egg timer and always tried to beat our last time.)

Roy loved to bet, and after I got the hang of it from him, I found it gave life just that bit of edge it needed. Our days were packed with exciting wagers. For example, we never just rolled the dolly back from the truck; instead we played a game called “dolly-trust.” Roy would drop the dolly backwards with me standing upright on it and then he would grab it one tiny second before it hit the cement. I felt my stomach dropping and my knees would go weak but I
had
to trust him. If I twitched or stiffened one muscle, I lost the bet and had to line up all the new magazines and he got to be boss. If I never made a peep, I got to be boss and
he had to do the job. The winner was merciless in extracting obeisance from the other. The magazines had to be arranged exactly as the “boss” suggested. If one was not equidistant from the next or, God forbid, hidden behind another, the “assistant” had to pile them up and start all over again.

At precisely 10:30 a.m. each Saturday all the employees had a break. We sat around the large red Coke cooler where the ice had melted and we fished out our Cokes. I had to stand on a wooden bottle crate to reach inside. Roy had a game, of course, to make it more interesting. Each twisted green Coke bottle had the name of a city on the bottom indicating which bottling plant it had come from. Roy would yell out a city and whoever had the bottle with the closest city had to pay for all seven of the Cokes. Roy knew every city and what cities were closest to it. Whenever anyone challenged him and we looked at the map of the U.S. in the toy section, he was right. Once I lost my whole salary when he yelled out “Tulsa” and I had Wichita and Irene had Oklahoma City.

When I was in grade one Sister Timothy, my teacher, told my mother that she had never met a child who knew more about geography than I did and that one of the advantages of having an only child is you can give her so much in terms of travel. My mother was perplexed since I had never been more than thirty miles from Lewiston. Roy said people learn best when the stakes are high.

I liked looking at things Roy-style. When my mother's best friend's son finally died after being in an iron lung for years, my mother said it was so unfair to die at the age of six. When I told Roy that Roland had died, he seemed happy and said, “I'll bet he was glad to get out of that iron caterpillar and move around.”

He also knew things that were interesting to
me
. My father dabbled in chemistry as a hobby and my mother was devoted to history, neither of which interested me. One smelled and the other had already happened. Roy had been all over the United States. He had driven semis and been a cowpoke. When we loaded Borden's Milk Chocolate with the cow on the package, he would tell me about his sojourn out west when he branded cattle and birthed calves. If some of the calves had “hard times gettin' out” (I wasn't exactly sure
where
they came out) they had to have their little legs handcuffed together and then the cowboys pulled them out with all of their strength. The poor critters who lost oxygen at birth were so dumb they couldn't learn to stay away from the electric fence and had to be tied up.

At exactly 12:30 p.m. each Saturday, Roy and I headed out for an afternoon of prescription deliveries. My mother taught me to read when I was four but Roy's mother had never taught him to read because, as Roy said, she had so many children she didn't know what to do. Roy had to quit school and go out and work from the age of eight. I told him to stop “bellyaching” (a word I got from him) since I was only
four
at the time. Roy said he could top me in two ways: he had brothers and sisters in fourteen states of the Union and he had what I longed for — a driver's licence. It was a match made in heaven. I read the address aloud, and Roy drove to it.

Music was not a part of my life. My father listened to the news and my mother sang in the church choir and my mother's friend Mrs. Aungier taught piano. I was going to start piano lessons when I was six. I had no idea that there were ways to make music other than through the piano or the church organ, until I met Roy.
He always blasted a radio listening to Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton. Roy and I would perform duets and I would be Ella Fitzgerald and he would be Louis Armstrong. I remember the seasons by the songs we sang. We drove our green Rambler into the sun with burnt-orange maple leaves gracefully floating over the gorge in the cool air and we sang “Ain't Misbehavin'.” Sometimes we'd forage along the gorge for the best specimens of acorns and chestnuts for jewellery-making and Roy would make glittering necklaces which I wore till they shrivelled in the winter. For the employee Christmas party we sang a duet of “Mean to Me” in Loretta's Italian-American Restaurant and even Loretta's husband came out of the kitchen to clap.

Sometimes we would have deliveries that were far away. My father specialized in rare medicine that only a few people needed so he had customers in other cities and on Indian reservations and even in Canada. Roy and I would have lunch on the road. My parents would never let me play the jukebox, saying it was a waste of money — “Five plays and you could have bought the record” was my father's take on leased fun. Roy always plied me with nickels and we played everything right from the machine in our booth. As usual we shared our mania for time management and we would bet how many songs we could hear before our hamburgers arrived and how many while we were eating. He was right the first few times and won money off me, but I began to catch on and learned to eat with great speed or to languish over my pie.

I was amazed that everyone from Batavia to Fort Erie knew Roy. There wasn't one truck stop where people didn't wave and call out his name, especially the waitresses. I guess Roy stood out,
with Tootsie Roll fingers that looked bleached on the palm side, and a funny accent that I figured was Western. He also had a laugh which shook his whole body and filled any room we were in — even our church with its vaulted ceilings.

One day I said that I'd seen Annette Funicello on
Spin and Marty
wearing a tee-shirt with decorations on it. “No problem,” he said, “leave me a tee-shirt and I'll make somethin' you've never seen or ever will see.” Within a week he presented me with a tee-shirt that was covered in bottle caps that made a clinking sound when I walked. He had taken the cork out of the inside of the bottle caps and squeezed the material in between holding the cap in place. I had 144 bottle caps on my shirt and a photographer took my picture and it appeared in the
Niagara Falls Gazette
. I never went anywhere that kids wouldn't ask if they could read all the caps. I loved that shirt that clinked when I walked and wore it till it fell apart. The best part was it could never be washed. Roy said, “Just pitch it out like a Kleenex.” My mother had trouble with this disposable concept.

The most exciting event of my childhood occurred on a winter's day in January of 1953. I was going to go to a birthday party at the Cataract Theatre in Niagara Falls to see
Cinderella
. My mother had a big day at the historical board so I went to work with my dad in my red organza party dress, ankle socks with lace trim, and black patent leather Mary Janes. My blond braids were forgone and I wore my hair down my back with a red taffeta ribbon in the front. I also carried a strawberry-shaped purse which zipped open under the green felt stem. When I arrived at work I made a grand entrance and Roy screamed in a high-pitched voice and got out his sunglasses, saying he couldn't take
so much dazzle so early in the morning. I told him my mother's warning which was I couldn't get dirty with newsprint and he had to drive me to the theatre at exactly 2:00 p.m.

It had been snowing all day and we had trouble driving the few blocks to the cinema. As I looked out of the delivery car window I saw all the girls huddled under the marquee in their matching hats, coats, and muffs. The party had been organized by Mr. Reno (Roy called him Mr. Richo), the Cadillac salesman whose dealership was next to my father's store. I really didn't know the stuck-up daughter, Eleanor (Roy called her El Dorado), that well. Now that I saw her with her friends I realized she was older and I was out of my league. Those girls went to school together and I was going to be the baby who didn't go to school. Who would I sit with? What would I say when they asked whose class I was in? Another girl arrived and I watched as all the girls ran up to her and crowded around her. I knew it was time to get out of the car. I could hear my mother's voice beating in my head, “You've accepted the invitation, now it would be rude not to attend,” or my father who would say, “Just go over and introduce yourself.”

I told Roy I was a little worried about how he would find the addresses for the deliveries without me and that maybe I should skip the party. He looked through the window, nodded, and said, “Those are
some
alley cats!” I remember feeling relief that he also found them scary and I wasn't being a total baby. I suddenly felt like crying and I got mad, “carrying on,” as my mother would say, claiming I didn't want to go to the party because the girls were huge and looked like monsters, and I hated my dress and I tore the ribbon out of my hair. Roy leaned back, put the car in park, and said, “It's your call.” I continued sitting. Finally Roy said, “I
got a bet for ya. . . .” When I didn't bite he continued. “I bet when we walk up there together all those young ladies will run up to you wantin' one of them fruit pocketbooks. If they don't I'll owe you a Coke and a magazine-rack boss.” I jumped out of the car knowing he didn't like losing a bet. I held his hand tightly as we headed under the marquee and I leaned on him a bit. The girls ran over and admired my strawberry-replica purse and chatted and I dropped Roy's hand and he waved goodbye.

After the party the snow was worse. It was hard to see across the street. The windshield wipers couldn't keep up with the downfall and the plows were nowhere to be seen. Roy turned off the radio, which was a first, and said, “We have to get all the way out to LaSalle to drop off this insulin. Read the map and give me new directions because we'll have to stick to the main streets.” (I knew they were the red lines.) “We just doin' the emergencies — leave the rest till tomorrow. This the worst squall I see'd since panning up Alaska way.”

I looked around. We were the only car on Niagara Falls' busiest street. It got windy on the way to LaSalle and we had whiteouts on the road that felt as though we were sewn into a moving cloud so thick we couldn't fight our way out. Suddenly there was no more road so we pulled over to a spot we hoped was the shoulder and heard the wind whistle through the window tops and sway the car. We watched the wet snow freeze on the windshield faster than the wipers could snap it away, and the trees glistened exactly as they had in
Cinderella
. I recounted the whole plot to Roy and he asked all kinds of questions about the glass slipper and how they got all around the town. He said they needed our delivery services instead of a pumpkin. We were laughing about
the ugly stepsisters, saying the king was betting two-to-one the shoe wouldn't fit
their
feet. We really killed ourselves laughing about my pre-party temper tantrum and he imitated me pulling off my ribbon and hurling it on the dash.

Finally the car couldn't move at all and I had to drive out and Roy had to push. That was the most fun. We howled with laughter as I sat on our coats, moved the seat all the way forward, grabbed the knob on the steering wheel, looked out the slit of the windshield I could see if I stretched my neck over the leather-tied steering wheel, and floored it while Roy pushed. Finally we pulled out of the drift and gave each other the high five and jumped up and down. After that episode we decided to keep going and not stop at all, so we drove slowly through red lights. Mr. Heinrich was shaking when we got there because he needed his insulin and was really worried. He seemed truly amazed we made it at all, saying it was “a tribute to our pioneer spirit.” Roy tried to call my father from Mr. Heinrich's home but ice had pulled down the phone lines.

It was dark when we got to the top of the steep Lewiston hill with its narrow road carved into the Niagara Escarpment. The beginning of the descent was blocked by a police cruiser with a red pulsing light making the snow look like red dream dust from
Cinderella
. He shone a flashlight into the car as he stopped us. I noticed that Roy was not his usual cheery self and Mr. Lombardy, who was sometimes a policeman in emergencies, usually parades, said, “No one is goin' down that sheet of ice. Even the sanding truck couldn't make it with chains on its caterpillar wheels.”

“I got Jim McClure's girl in the car here and I got to get her home.”

“Where were you three hours ago, Roy?”

Roy didn't answer. I didn't think Mr. Lombardy was being as polite as he usually was. I leaned over and told Mr. Lombardy that Roy had to wait for me during the birthday party and then we had to get out to LaSalle to drop off some emergency medication before coming home.

“Not to worry, little lady. I'll call on my radio and let your dad know you're staying up in the Falls and we'll have ‘er cleared in the morning.” Someone yelled for Mr. Lombardy from across the road and he ran over to a big tow truck.

“I don't like the smell of this,” Roy said while rubbing his chin. I noticed he did this when he got nervous. “I guess I shoulda gone into that movie and got ya out. I didn't want to embarrass ya in front of all them big gals. But none of ‘em had to get down the Lewiston hill. They all live in the heights.”