Oliver's Twist (2 page)

Rain was the background music of my childhood. Situated on the edge of lush Pacific rainforest with mountains at its back, Prince Rupert endured what seemed a continuous downpour, lifting occasionally to a drizzle. We wore gumboots year-round and joked of being born with webbed feet. Our famous high school basketball team was named “the Rainmakers.” The rainfall could last for months on end, provoking depression and even suicide, not to mention natural disaster. I recall being woken one morning by a great roar. The rain had lashed down in such torrents that a whole section of mountainside above the town gave way, burying half a dozen citizens in a tomb of mud and splintered timber.

By 1944, our town of nine thousand souls had become a colony of America, transformed by the presence of some fifteen thousand American troops stationed in our midst. Most were with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working on the construction of the Alaska Highway; others were infantrymen on their way to combat in the Pacific. The war was never far from our minds, and there were moments of genuine fright. House lights had to be turned off and blackout curtains drawn during periodic air raid warnings. No sliver of illumination was allowed while civilian monitors checked the residential streets, banging on the doors if the blackout order was violated. After Pearl Harbor, a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was expected at any time.

In this hothouse environment, everyone lived for the
moment. If life might be short, it had better be fast, and few relationships survived the ride. My earliest memories are of drunken verbal bouts between my parents, shouts of “chippy” and “whore,” followed by the sounds of shattering glass, physical struggles, and cries of pain. The hostilities ceased when I called out, begging my parents to stop, but the battle resumed the moment they thought I was asleep again. I remember countless late-night parties, punctuated with the high-pitched laughter of women and the roars of inebriated men. In my sleeping place in an alcove off the living room, I played with stacks of American military caps tossed carelessly on my bed.

Then, the year I started elementary school, my mother vanished from my life as if in a puff of smoke. A photo dated 1945 shows her embracing a square-jawed man named Cliff Dahl. The courts gave custody to my father, a ruling that was almost unprecedented in those days. Either the judge concluded Mom was an unfit parent for reasons I can only guess at, or my father cruelly deceived her. One of their friends later told me that my father had lied about the date of the custody hearing. The loss of her only child—temporarily, as it turned out—plunged my mother into a prolonged depression, the first of many that would plague her as she grew older.

My father had won sole responsibility for my care, but it proved to be a burden that was far beyond him. His “work” kept him out nights or on the road, and however well-meaning, he was not temperamentally suited to child rearing. He solved the problem by shopping me around as a boarder to various households, all strangers in need of extra dollars. Before being paraded in front of these prospective foster parents, I was dressed up in a blue double-breasted jacket and lectured sternly about making a
favourable impression. Some families rejected me with a sweep of the hand, even while I sat there trying to be as appealing as possible.
Nope, not our type.
Or,
he talks a lot, doesn't he
? At other addresses we made the decision ourselves, Dad marching me out while whispering that the people were assholes.

On some level these painful rebukes and the implicit rejection by my father must have registered. They added to the sting of my mother's unexplained departure, instilling a profound insecurity that would surface eventually. Until a refuge could be found for me, I was without any semblance of a normal home life. No hovering grandparents, no close connections with aunts, uncles, or cousins, no siblings for companionship or comfort. At the time, however, these experiences seemed perfectly normal to me, hardly damaging to my psyche or self-esteem. I felt no loneliness and in fact revelled in the novelty of my circumstances.

I knew kids from large close-knit families but I considered their well-disciplined lives a predictable bore. Rupert's Lower Third was my playground, and in times of my father's absence, I lived more like a child of the streets than a middle-class schoolboy. On one occasion, I lost the quarter Dad had given me for a school lunch. I had no qualms about begging from a passing tourist rather than go hungry. I was left to look after myself, at least until Dad came home well after midnight.

Evenings were spent walking a familiar circuit, often in casual search of my father, which meant traipsing up and down Third Avenue and into its seedy beer joints. I had to jump up to catch a glimpse through the oval-shaped windows of the swinging doors and into the smoky haze. The pungent odour of stale beer and wet cigarette butts tossed outside still lingers in my nostrils. My habit was to ask an entering patron to call out
for Murray Oliver. If Murray did not emerge, it was on to the next watering hole until I tracked him down. He wasn't always pleased to be so summoned.

When the war ended in 1945, all the soldiers left and the town's kids played in empty barracks and gun emplacements until the government demolished them. We collected army badges and parts of uniforms—hats were big trade items. I found a small pistol that I happily assumed some other boy had lost. It had reddish grips and made a satisfying click when I pulled the trigger. Why it would not ignite the paper caps we bought for our other toy guns, I could never figure out, but I was crushed when some alert adult took it away, recognizing it for the real thing.

The war was over, but hard drinking and hard living still characterized the community. Rupert thrived in the postwar boom, providing every resource an expanding nation required. As well as benefiting from the fish and lumber harvest, the city was at the centre of recently discovered gold, silver, and copper deposits and could ship all these riches to market by sea or rail. The population swelled to twice its wartime number as fast-buck artists, speculators, and job seekers poured in. They contributed to a volatile mix of hardrock miners and fishermen, steel-handed loggers, cannery workers, and sailors on shore leave. White skins barely outnumbered a population of Tsimshian Indians and Canadian-born Chinese and Japanese.

This made for a colourful streetscape, especially on Saturday nights. Hundreds of people elbowed one another along the four blocks of Lower Third Avenue as they walked past dingy saloons, greasy-spoon restaurants, illicit gambling joints, and private “clubs” like the Moose Lodge and the Freemasons'. The
narrow main drag was bordered by dozens of such enterprises, all housed in tight-fitting wood-frame buildings.

As a crowded seaport, Rupert was a smaller and more northerly version of Marseilles and attracted equally eccentric characters. There was one-legged Dominic, owner of the steam bath. He never wore anything but a black suit, the right leg pinned up at the hip. Every Christmas for High Mass, he bought a new black suit, along with a fresh pair of long underwear. Having one leg, he pointed out, saved in shoe leather. The Italian shoe repairman made and maintained Dominic's single custom boot.

Ricardo the Hook had lost a hand in the war. I was an appreciative audience for the repertoire of tricks he performed with a mean-looking, curved steel appendage, always sporting a speared cigarette. Twenty-Dollar Dolly White had launched her business during the war years. She bought a dilapidated row house and imported a collection of young ladies from Vancouver. Nearby, in the short alley that became famous locally as “The Line,” Dolly's own refurbished establishment was known as the “White House,” an elegant stopping place for American officers. A model of the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold, she took an interest in my welfare and was always a reassuring presence.

Then there was Eric, the railway conductor, who for years juggled two fiancées living at opposite ends of his run from Rupert to Prince George. The arrangement fell apart when fate brought the two women together in a coach car. Comparing notes on the men they expected to marry, they discovered they were betrothed to the same fellow. Eric was horrified to see the two women step off the train together and, in unison, throw
their engagement rings at him. Eric spent hours on his knees trying to retrieve the diamonds from a snowdrift.

My habitual route took me through an underpass below street level where a dank cellar housed the “Dungeon,” a pool hall where men played for money and the local sharks emptied the pockets of out-of-towners. Popeye, who ran the nearby cigar store, always welcomed me with a free soft drink.

There really is no such thing as the “common people,” but I suppose that is how these uncommon individuals could be described. They were the companions of my daily life in those years, and I was treated like one of them—always with kindness and never abuse. Strangers could be generous and caring, it seemed, while those closer to home couldn't always be trusted.

A dog bite eventually brought about another sharp detour in my life. At the age of eight, I was attacked while playing with a group of chums. Nearly sixty years later I still have the scars on my arm. The family who owned the dog was very concerned, and probably fearful that my father might bring a lawsuit. Evidently some kind of a deal was struck, because soon after I found myself moving in with the dog's owners, “Brick” and Mabel Skinner. I stayed with them for four years, the dog and I maintaining an uneasy truce.

The Skinners lived in a one-bedroom house on Borden Street, perched at the end of a long steep pathway on the side of the mountain. Here was family life at last, but theirs was a loveless house without much happiness. It was understood that my place in it was temporary.

Brick was a fire plug of a man and, fittingly, the fire chief down at the government docks. He was gruff and sometimes short-tempered, but not mean-spirited. His wife, Mabel, who
was rigid, unyielding, and without a trace of compassion, became my tormentor. They had an adopted son my age, Jimmy, a cheerful kid who squinted badly through wire-rimmed glasses. It angered Mabel that Jimmy always seemed to be led by me, and she never stopped reminding me that Jimmy would one day be a success while I would never amount to anything. I recall one hurtful rebuff at bedtime when I forgot myself and called her “Mommy.” For that slip I was sharply reprimanded. I had a real mother, Mabel told me, but she was an immoral woman who had left me behind.

Life with the Skinners was not all bad. Jimmy and I shared the makeshift attic bedroom with a boarder, an elderly man whom I knew as Frank Redman. While puffing on a long pipe that was never out of his mouth except for its ritual daily cleaning, Frank held me spellbound with romantic stories of life in the Old West. All his tales, he assured me, were based on personal experience of the lawless frontier. He claimed to have been a Montana cowboy during the 1880s, forced to flee across the border after shooting someone in a fight over a horse. His accounts of cattle drives, cowboys and Indians, and the rugged independence of the lone man on horseback—possibly lifted from Zane Grey dime novels—enthralled me and set my imagination free amidst clouds of Ogden's Fine Cut Tobacco. After the guilty excitement of women's lingerie, my favourite pages in the Eaton's catalogue were those devoted to saddles, chaps, and firearms.

I fantasized about being anyone else, anywhere else: a secret agent, a benevolent dictator, a gun-toting frontiersman living the free life on the plains with a faithful horse my only companion. It was lights out at seven o'clock, but in that attic and under the covers by flashlight, I read any book I could find or borrow.
Later, lying in the dark at my end of the attic beside the lone window, I always looked for the North Star, comforted by its constancy in a life that so far had been quite unpredictable.

Books and reading were welcome escapes, although an astute teacher had discerned a vision problem. I confessed to her that I could not read the blackboard, and glasses were prescribed. When the optician diagnosed crossed eyes, Mabel took me to Vancouver for the necessary surgery. The day after, Dad surprised me in the hospital room with my first pair of cowboy boots.

Brick had a cousin named Bill Bickle who owned a cattle ranch at a place called Grassy Plains near Burns Lake, British Columbia, a spot long since drowned by a hydro project. I spent glorious summers there with the welcoming Bickle family, who kindly assigned me my own horse, Lazy Dick. I rode the dusty country roads into town to pick up goods at the general store and was thrilled one day to be photographed by an American tourist who mistook me for a genuine ranch hand.

Ranch life held a few rude surprises, though. One morning I watched Bickle shoot a steer, then cut a hole in its side with a knife to bleed it. The steer fell on its front knees while yelping dogs lapped up the blood. This was my first experience of violent death and the episode became the stuff of nightmares for weeks afterwards. Surely this was nothing Gene Autry or Roy Rogers would ever be part of.

Growing up under the roofs of strangers imparted some inescapable lessons. Too soon perhaps, I learned to judge people with cold logic, by their actions rather than their words. I guarded my own emotions carefully, even while drawing out the feelings and motives of others. Engaging with those who controlled my fate, carefully fitting in with a minimum of fuss, became a
survival technique. At the same time, I formed a conviction that every person must look out for himself before all else.

Despite a growing independent streak, I longed for my father's occasional visits. These were increasingly rare as Dad looked to expand his booze trade into new markets, but they were frequently memorable. Thanks to liquor rationing in Canada during the war, I spent many an hour standing in line at the government outlet, holding a place for Dad. In Alaska, however, booze was unlimited. Ketchican, the nearest Alaskan port to Rupert, was a wide-open town in what was then wilderness territory. It had its own red light district of tiny shacks, bars, and bordellos built on jetties out over the harbour. And its resources were only a few hours away from Rupert in the beefedup fishing boat Murray had purchased. He made the dash across treacherous and unpredictable waters at night to load up with American spirits, then returned to Rupert where he sold the booze at a markup of 100 percent.