Summertime

better days ________ www.coopradio.org
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Poverty and imagination. Abandonment and fantasy.
Blood and water. Silence and the urge to sing.
It is the last half of the 1950's. Saskatchewan.

Some homes have this new thing called television.
We visit, watch a show while the father adjusts
the rabbit-ears aerial to reduce the bugs, improve
the picture. There, he says, and we squint.

We don't have television yet. Our house is still
a radio house. My mother in the kitchen making the
scalloped potatoes, her strawberry blond hair in a
bun, singing along with the songs. Hank Williams is
already dead, but they keep playing his songs.

It's June. Chokecherries dry out our tongues. Water
is so cold and delicious. D'Arcy, Ralph, Cathy and I
have cut a rectangular opening in a big cardboard box.
The box is upside down in the backyard, the rectangle
on one side near the top. I climb inside and peek my
face through the opening. I am on television. I begin
singing Hank Williams. Cathy leaps up and changes the
channel. Now I am Ken Knudson of CHAB and I am telling
D'Arcy, Ralph and Cathy to buy their next bedroom suite
at Joyners. They laugh, throw chokecherries.

Mr. Hunchuck crawls by in his pickup truck with a woman
sitting up close to him. She has her hand inside his
workshirt. We know his wife and that's not her. This
woman is younger, her hair is dark and long. Her eyes
are empty and gleaming, and her red lips are open in
a way that his wife's lips never get. His eyes, when
he sees us, are full and menacing. His eyes tell us
something. We're not sure what, but in our imaginations
Mr. Hunchuck is holding a rifle and saying, Don't ever.

Ralph and D'Arcy take turns being on television. Ralph
is a sports announcer giving the baseball scores, and he
says the Kansas City Athletics beat the New York Yankees
and we all laugh. It's pretend, so that's allowed. D'Arcy
has a harder time being on tv. He's different. He is much
more serious than the rest of us. There is something in his
eyes that is similar to what went by in Mr. Hunchuck's eyes,
younger and less experienced, but a kind of danger all the
same. Makes you wonder.

It is Cathy's turn at last. Going over to Fedoruk's and
Harte's to watch real television - as if there is such a
thing - we had rarely seen a girl or a woman on the screen.
So seeing Cathy is novel. She sticks her arms right out of
the hole and waves to us. You can't do that!, Ralphie says.
D'Arcy is still quiet after the embarrassing two minutes
of his first television appearance. No, it's okay, I say,
let her do what she wants.

Cathy pretends she is running for mayor. The first girl
ever to do that, as far as I can tell. She tells us she is
going to put Coca-Cola in the water fountains, and have
ice cream delivered to our houses every day by taxi. She
reaches out of the television and shakes our hands, winking
at us. If we had babies, she'd kiss them. Well?, she asks
toward the end of her show, can I count on your vote?
In our minds just for a moment, she is the first woman mayor
that Moose Jaw has ever had.

A little later that year, the stunning heat of late July, my
brother makes the all-star team in baseball as a lefthanded
pitcher and first baseman. Mr. Hunchuck is the head coach.
I go to the games with mom and dad and we sit there watching
and cheering. Cathy's older brother is the backcatcher and
she sticks her tongue out at him when he comes back to the
screen to retrieve a ball. Ever since I told her she'd make a
good mayor, she's always gone out of her way to share her
candy and stuff with me.

It's sort of weird between innings when Mr. Hunchuck comes
near the scorekeeper's table to make a lineup change. He
says hello to my dad. He's got a toothpick in his mouth,
rolling around. He looks at me. He still has that look in his
eyes that makes goosebumps race along my arms. After
he turns away, I squint into the setting sun, thinking of
that pretty dark-haired woman he had in the truck that
day, her red lips open, her eyes empty and shining.

DL