Driving through Sussex, N.B. in a boxy four-door Datsun 210 in winter, Christmastime, Chris is shifting stick and “Fly at Night” by Chilliwack is on the eight-track.
We’ve got Southern Comfort in a flask, Coke for mix in a glass quart bottle, and we’ve come out of the sugar bush where Doug Simpson had a camp and a couple of old snowmobiles, both of them oil and gas mixed two-stroke, the exhaust about as unique a smell as you will ever smell.
We’re laughing, but the car is all over the road, swinging way wide with every turn, while Chris is pretending he’s an excellent driver, all the while shifting a toothpick around in his mouth the way he saw someone do in a movie. “Go ahead, make my day,” he says, though we all know he’s 17 and not anything like Clint Eastwood.
Past the Simpson’s mail-order and down past the station where you have to stand on the platform and wave a flag to stop the Dayliner if you want to head out of the province by train. Tickets from the conductor, and bring your own sly booze because the bar car’s expensive.
Cop car with the round sweeping dome lights on the roof picks us up on Station St., and Chris puts the pedal right down, the Datsun fishtailing on the white ice, and in the streetlights, I can see where he lost the top digit of his index finger in the hamburger patty-press at his dad’s butcher shop.
And the cop behind us is a town legend because he once pulled his service gun to shoot a run-over cat and missed with all six shots.
We lose the cop because the Datsun is light and nimble, and unlike a Crown Vic with a big engine, a heavy cop chassis and one guy inside, we can all get out and push our car back out of the snowbank whenever we take a turn and get stuck.
And later I’m dancing with a girl with all of her her brown curly hair piled up on the top of her head and a black velvet choker and I think I look pretty good, brown cords and a plaid shirt with metal snaps, three snaps open on my bare-skin hairless chest, but it’s hot in the Legion, and I’m wearing work boots with slippery hard plastic soles, and it’s all I can do to stand upright. Probably would have been better if I had worn my Hush Puppies, but that would have been odd out at Doug’s camp, shooting porcupines on the edge of the trail with borrowed guns and fancy shoes.
Not sure what her name was, but she had a lovely, lovely smile.
Later still, and I’m staying at Doug’s house in the basement, his parents have a cool A-frame and we spend some time shifting a sleeve of tinfoil along the television cable to bypass the scrambler and see scraps of French Canadian softcore porn. Something like a breast occasionally appears out of the clouds of blue-white static, and we are riveted.
We’re fading, Doug is somehow stoned on the lousiest of weed, Chris and his car have disappeared somewhere along the line, and I know we’ll be so sorry in the morning.
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Oh the memories ….