Nobody Cries at Bingo (31 page)

I had closed my eyes at some point in the accident and when I opened them, I found myself lying on the roof of the car, in the back seat. Jolene was at my feet. I nudged her with my knee and her head came up. “What?” she asked.

“I smell gas,” I said. If this accident was like the ones in the movies, then, in seconds, flames would consume the car and light up the Saskatchewan night for miles.

Jolene said she didn't smell anything as she felt around the ceiling for her other earring. “Why did my earrings fall out? That's weird.”

“Forget your earring. We have to get out before we are burned alive!” I tried to open my car door but the sides of the ditch held it closed. “It won't open! Try yours!”

Jolene yawned and scratched her head. She did not seem to understand the dire nature of our situation, so I took a page from the book of Adelle and pinched her arm. “Ow! You ass!” she cried.

“Open your door!” I commanded.

Jolene made a face at me. She tried her door. It would not open either.

“We're trapped!” I said. “We are trapped in an upside down car and we are going to be burned alive . . . like . . . like . . . h amburgers.” It was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.

Jolene was not convinced this was an emergency. She lay back down. “I'm tired.”

“Don't fall asleep, you'll die!”

I rummaged through the back seat — now the ceiling of the car — and found a bottle and an old sock. I put the sock on my hand and hit the window with the bottle. The window smashed; I cleared away the glass with the bottle and crawled through. I was proud of my ingenuity and remarked up on it several times during the next half hour.

Jolene followed behind me and said little except, “Why did my earring fall out? That's so weird.”

It was a warm night, which was good because we had a long walk to the nearest house. A young man we had not yet met answered the door. His name was Super Dave. He laughed when he heard about the accident. Then he asked if we were okay.

I nodded. “There aren't any visible injuries . . . but there might be internal bleeding. You never know.”

He climbed in his truck and drove us home. As we passed the car, he stopped and inspected it. He let out a low whistle. “Did that window break in the roll? You girls are lucky you didn't get cut up.”

Jolene pointed at me. “No, she broke it.”

“Only because we were trapped inside the car and I could smell gas!” My hysteria returned as I recalled our close call.

“Why didn't you just roll the window down?” Super Dave asked.

It was a simple question. I could not formulate an answer that did not make me seem like a total idiot. Instead I said that my leg hurt and asked him to hurry so I could go put ice on it.

When Super Dave dropped us off at the house, Adelle and Celeste were annoyed that we had taken so long. Their annoyance turned into relief when they heard what had happened.

“I am so glad I didn't go first,” Celeste proclaimed. “Because Mom and Dad are going to kill you.”

Adelle was upset at Jolene. “We have to go get the car.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“We'll walk and then when we get there, we'll tip the car over.”

“Can we do that?” I knew Adelle was strong — I had seen her lose her temper when some boys had teased her about her weight — but this was a whole car, not a couple of teenagers.

“Yes, you just tip it. Tip it.”

Adelle kept repeating the phrase over and over again. Jolene ignored her and went to watch TV in the living room.

My gut was sore. Not from the accident itself, from the anticipation of all the trouble I was in. If it were only Mom, I would have been fine. She yelled, but her yelling was powerless, and if I pretended my leg hurt, she would calm right down. Unfortunately for me, my dad had recently rejoined the family circle. And like my mom, he was a firm believer that we ought to stay out of cars driven by Adelle and Jolene.

I decided that we should alert Uncle Johnny to the accident. Jolene was against this plan. Adelle was on the fence and Celeste thought it was a good idea because she figured it would be more interesting than anything that was currently on TV.

I shared my rationale. “If Uncle Johnny finds out about the accident at bingo, then he'll have time to get over it. That way he won't be so mad when he gets home.”

The girls looked unconvinced. In retrospect, I can see the flaw in my reasoning. Telling our parents at bingo interrupted their good time and also gave their anger more time to grow. I know that now.

We made the phone call to the bingo hall and paged my uncle. By the time he got to the phone, he sounded anxious.

“Who's this? What's going on?”

“Uncle Johnny?”

“Yes. Who's this?”

“It's Dawn. Your niece.”

“Right, what's wrong?”

“You see, your car. It's been in an accident.” I commended myself on my choice of words. It wasn't anyone's fault, really, rolling over and totaling themselves was just something cars did.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Well, my leg hurts a little but it's not as bad as the time I got my tonsils out--“

“Let me talk to Adelle.”

I handed the phone to Adelle and gave her an apologetic look.

“It's Jolene's fault! She's in the living room. Jolene! Jolene! She's not listening. Because she never listens! I told them not to go! I'm not stupid, you're stupid, Dad!”

Adelle hung up the phone. Now we just had to wait.

When my parents arrived home, I knew I was in big trouble. It was clear from the way my mom rushed into the house before my dad. I could hear his booming laugh on the steps of the porch as he exchanged accident stories with my uncle.

Mom grabbed my arms and pushed me towards my bedroom. “Go to sleep.”

“What about Dad?”

“Go to sleep!”

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark room. This was not going to solve anything. Mom was judging the situation based on what she would do. Her temper was like porridge; it was hot, but if you ignored it, it quickly turned cold. Dad's temper only got hotter and hotter until it was vented.

The next sound I heard was Dad's big booming voice. “Where is Dawn?” I stood up in the dark.

My mom answered for me. “Oh, she's tired.”

“Tired from what? Rolling cars! Is that what makes people tired? Accidents?”

My stomach could not take it anymore. I opened the bedroom door and padded into the kitchen. Dad stood by the cupboards and pondered his rhetorical questions at the top of his lungs.

“I'm sorry.” I hung my head.

“You should be sorry! You ruined your uncle's car.”

“Adelle said he could tip it over?”

“Tip it over! Tip it over!” My dad was incredulous. “Is that your answer for everything?”

This was normal. My dad's temper often grew so hot that it melted his reason. “I did not raise you to tip over cars! We drive cars! That's what we do! Not you. And not your cousins! You don't drive cars! I drive cars!”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Sorry that you got caught or sorry that you rolled?”

I wasn't going to take a chance on that one.

Mom decided it was time for a story of woe. Her voice took on the sad tone she normally reserved for discussing the Holocaust. “We pulled up beside the car and your uncle got out and all he could say was ‘it's totaled. It's totally totaled.'” As she imitated Uncle Johnny, her voice dropped to a sad whisper.

My dad ignored her. “You could have died! You could have killed someone! And what about your brother and sister, who was watching them?!”

At this point, my brother and sister were standing in the kitchen behind him, each of them leaning against the cupboards counting their lucky blessings that they had decided to wait for the second car ride that night.

The yelling continued for a few minutes longer. I was grounded, which normally had no effect on us except that the next night was Halloween, ironically the only night when we got to leave the house.

I knew I had done wrong and I served my punishment without complaint.

Jolene, on the other hand, went out trick or treating. She came by the house dressed as a raccoon. Adelle was dressed as a clown.

“Wasn't your dad mad?” I asked.

“Yeah. He was really mad.” Jolene seemed unconcerned.

I looked to Adelle for comprehension. Adelle rolled her eyes. “She never listens.”

“Anyone wanna go for a ride?” Jolene dangled a set of car keys from her finger.

When I was fifteen, my mom took me to Fort Qu'Appelle to write my Learner's test. It was no surprise to my mom when I passed the written portion. “Just like me. I passed on my first time too,” Mom crowed.

In our province, the Learner Permit allowed you to drive at any time as long as there was an adult driver next to you. On the reserve, this requirement was pushed to its limit to include situations such as, “permission to drive your mom around after she's had a few,” “permission to drive your unlicensed uncles to the store to pick up smokes,” and “permission to drive your cousins home after midnight because you're all making too much noise and Mom is too tired to do it.”

After six months of supervised practice driving, you were allowed to do the test. To keep my fear at a minimum, Mom described the driving test in detail. “It's the worst half hour of your life. They're gonna make you parallel park and you have to be twelve centimetres from the curb. If you're off by even one centimetre, it's all over.”

Mom was in charge of teaching me to drive. She didn't just have the regular class six license; she also had the class eight license. If the class six exam required you to drive to hell and back, the class eight exam made you drive around each of the rings of hell in perfect concentric circles, backwards.

Driving lessons with Mom were perfect training for the test because they were also had the taint of hell on them. Mom was an exacting teacher. If you made a mistake, she bellowed in your ear or sucked in her breath in the manner of someone who had accidentally swallowed a lit cigarette.

I would quickly lose my temper. “What! What did I do?'

“Oh nothing. You only failed to come to a complete stop back there. Do you know what the instructor would do if you made a rolling stop? Do you?”

“Fail me?”

“If you're lucky! And you're not lucky so he'd probably make you get out of the driver's seat and drive you straight back to the test agency and tell you to wait another six months for your license.”

“Oh god.”

Normally, if you failed your exam, you had to wait two weeks before you could book again. By virtue of her class eight license, Mom claimed internal knowledge of the working of the provincial licensing department.

“And they hate, hate, hate it when people chew gum while they drive. Let me tell you.”

“How does gum affect my driving?”

“Can you think and chew and drive all the same time? Who are you Mario Andretti?”