Play the Jukebox © 2016 by Reid Dickie This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author´s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Printed and bound in Canada at McNally Robinson Booksellers, 1120 Grant Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3M 2A6. www.mcnallyrobinson.com/selfpublishing Cover and book design by McNally Robinson Booksellers. isbn 978-1-77280-017-3 first edition Play the Jukebox Reid Dickie M C NALLY ROBINSON With gratitude and love I dedicate this book to my parents, Helen and Bruce Dickie, whose gifts I used every day of my life, and to Linda, who lit my way. 1962 April 1962 usic comes from above, from up there, maybe from Heaven. MHeaven actually is the old RCA Victor radio that lives on top of the fridge in our kitchen. Brown plastic with a picture of Nipper the Dog listening to His Master’s Voice on the dial, the radio fills endless hours of the day with music and chatter. Mom listens intently all day, singing along with her favourite songs, crying during the sad songs and laughing at the announcers’ banter in their golden tones, as she calls them. The radio makes my mom happy every day. Mom uses her literary bent to enter radio contests, sending in short stories, jingles or poems. She’s very good at it because we have a spiffy new Hoover vacuum cleaner she won in a CKX contest and the set of dishes we use every day she won for a poem she sent to a CKDM contest. This is her winning poem: Why bachelors some men stay, That is the question of the day. I humbly submit this little jingle, To tell you why I think men stay single. They value most their independence, They shun the confines of a woman’s tendance. Some claim an unrequited love! Others a lack of God’s gifts from above! But I still say they just want to be free. PS: Thank goodness one changed his mind and married me! • 9 • When the mood hits her, Mom grabs an imaginary partner and dances around the kitchen, ducking, weaving and spinning, her face lit with happiness. “How do you like my Alice blue gown, kind sir?” Mom asks. “Why, my dear, it becomes you,” I say. She blushes behind her invisible fan. Of course it’s just her old cotton print housedress with the brown rickrack along the hem, but she curtsies, sways and spins with such grace and aplomb sometimes I can really see the huge blue dress swirling about her. These days the song that transforms Mom from a prairie housewife in a little Canadian town to a Southern belle at an elegant ball is Stranger on the Shore by Mister Acker Bilk. When it comes on the kitchen radio, Mom waltzes gracefully around the room appearing to be hanging on the arms of a tall handsome man who may or may not be Dad. She proclaims, more than once, how the song “gets my juices jumping.” Her metaphor is completely incomprehensible to my 12-year-old mind. Since I don’t understand it, it haunts me every time I hear the song. Imagining your mother’s “juices” is not among the willing thoughts on a growing boy’s mind. Seeing them “jumping,” even having to imagine the meaning of jumping juices of any kind, is unfathomable and creepy. I gain clarity on this topic sooner than I expect. Other times, when Bilk’s song comes on, Mom sits unmoved at the kitchen table, tracing the familiar faded pattern on the plastic tablecloth with her finger, her heavy head propped up over a cup of cold grey coffee, her hair hanging in thin strands across the hand that holds her head in place. These times, the mournful clarinet evokes memories of the hot August day when tragedy visited her little family and begins the downward spiral that leaves her in a darkened bedroom for days, levelled by another migraine. The pain coalesces into a rhythmic throbbing that knots her head, ramps up when she is exposed to bright light and floods her with nausea whenever she moves. A white enamel basin waits under her side of the bed in case she doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Mary Crawford knows life is a jape, a swindle, a cruel uncaring game of get • 10 • and lose, get and lose. The curdled milk, the rotten fruit, the mouldy bread, all symbols of ghastly change, arrange themselves in her mind and build concrete supports for the downward spiral. Her depression is enabled again. Whether dancing or dreaming, absent from Mom’s awareness is that the darkness that overwhelms her mood is also leaving its stain in her body. When Stranger on the Shore comes on Dad’s truck radio while he is hauling gasoline and diesel fuel to farms, gas stations and construction sites, he whistles along through his teeth to its plaintive cadence. A tiny horrific memory of some World War Two European battlefield flashes vividly present in his memory. Deafening blasts, living men, friends, suddenly in pieces around him, the reek of blood and rage and fear in his nose, the taste of tears and dirt in his mouth, terrified hours spent alone in a disabled tank on D-Day, chaos full blown, too much atrocity, too much horror to choose from, to even bear some days. But Stranger brings him back to the wheel in his hands and the prairie highway before him, licking his lips, anticipating the whisky. Ah, the whisky. Dad isn’t a drinker and driver; the Christian work ethic draws so powerfully upon his very being that he can’t work drunk. He knows that. If he loses his license for driving drunk, his livelihood disappears. Luckily, he also knows about and enjoys immensely the settling thought of future alcohol, imminent drinking, the pending place, a handy thought that gets him through many miles of gravel roads and oceans of gasoline. Once the Chevrolet fuel truck sits cooling and clanking in the Texaco yard at the end of the day, the glasses and bottle come out. Maybe one of his occasional freeloader buddies shows up, maybe he sits alone in the corrugated metal hut that is the business office with its metal chairs, metal desk, metal cabinets and dented metal wastebasket. Either way, he savours the whisky every sip. And when there isn’t the money or friendship for whisky, and there often isn’t, a fifth of grimace-inducing, throat-burning homebrew from some Ukrainian farmer north of town has to suffice. Handily, the buzz lives in homebrew too. • 11 • A late 1940s chipped brown plastic Philips radio with a frayed cord sits on the metal shelf above Dad’s desk and spews out the hits of the day. It weighs almost 12 pounds. When you turn it on using the post that long ago lost its knob, it creaks and crackles while its tubes warm up, finally picking up and filling the room with whatever the large round gold dial found. It has a great tone, though it is well past its throw-out date. After a few hours, you can see heat waves rising from its top. If Bilk’s song comes on while Dad is drinking, the war flashbacks are much less vivid, the horror somehow easier to bear. The alcohol accomplishes this by beating up on my dad. At Burgen’s Coffee Stop and Garage, Maryann Burgen sets down her tray and punches C7 on the big Seeburg jukebox. Mister Bilk’s melancholy melody wells up. Bad coffee, Tab, Coke and Fresca; cardboard French fries and (quite accidentally when compared to the rest of the menu) the best burger for two hundred miles in either direction; nickel tips and rude remarks, the familiar irritating ding and snap of the two Bally pinball machines that Jack Burgen, her father and the place’s owner, bought from Percy Peel; the dull clang of the bell hose through the wall from the service station and the endless longing to escape all this, to be elsewhere, anywhere but here – these are the constants in Maryann’s days. Another constant is the Seeburg jukebox with its sweeping coloured lights, chrome trim and an endless supply of musical escapes. The garish machine haunts a corner of the large restaurant, its volume always just loud enough to override the level of the din in Burgen’s. Maryann thinks of the jukebox as a secret lover who whispers in her ear loving words set to attractive melodies, which helps her get through long lonesome afternoons out on Highway 4. Burgen’s is a welcoming family stop along a busy highway in western Manitoba. It has red and yellow sparkly vinyl booths with Arborite tables, U-shaped counter service and a large open kitchen at the back. Families can gas up, stretch, run the • 12 • kids around and grab a meal in the restaurant. The afternoon ambience in Burgen’s is mellow and transient, a fading and recurring din pierced occasionally by the tiny shrill voices of travelling children.