Free Short Story
Dallas Wagner
A story about childhood, street hockey, hard-won compassion, and a woman who saw more than the neighbourhood children understood.
The cul-de-sac was filled with kids, mostly boys aged nine to twelve, playing street hockey. There was me and Ian Wagner, the twins Johnny and Carmi Vairo, little Stevie, and Randy Price. The other team was made up of kids from two streets over. We all loved hockey. We went to the same school, Senator Reid, where during lunch and recess we traded hockey cards and tall tales of our weekend adventures.
The games were getting very competitive. On this particular spring day, the winning goal was disallowed by the referee for high-sticking, which almost led to a fight between teams. I say almost because the referee, Dallas Wagner, was having none of it. She blew her whistle and called the game a draw. After all, it was dinner time, and Johnny and Carmi’s mom was standing in the driveway to the cul-de-sac. Their house was the last house on the street we always played on.
Dallas Wagner was Ian’s mom. When I met her, she was in her early forties. She had a cigarette in one hand, a margarita in the other, and a big spread of Mexican food out for the kids playing in front of her ground-floor apartment. Today Mexican food is common. In those days it was alien. We were still trying to get our heads around chicken à la king.
Dallas wasn’t a good-looking woman. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and her hairstyle wasn’t something you could define easily. She was about five foot nine, slim build. Her smile was engaging for sure, but her best traits were internal. She didn’t accept stereotypes, trash talk, or misogyny on any level. More than once, when engaging with other adults, she would say, “I’m going to ignore you said that,” or, “I don’t swim in that puddle.” She had no problem saying what she meant or putting you in your place.
She was fearless and the most interesting woman I have ever met.
She was born in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, in the mid-1930s. Her mother died giving birth to her. Her father, a trapper and gold panner, gave her up, leaving her with the priest and nuns at the Mary House in Whitehorse. Little Dallas was passed around from family to family, finally returning to her father when she was sixteen years old. He treated her like the son he never had. He showed her how to look for the best spots on the rivers and tributaries to pan for gold, how to hunt for food, and how to trap.
She excelled in all these things because she was bestowed with a sort of sixth sense. She gave up trapping in her early twenties. She told my father that when she found a wolf’s foot in her trap, she saw that the wolf had gnawed its foot off to get free. That haunted her for the rest of her life. She took all her father’s traps and buried them forever.
She left the Yukon Territory when she turned twenty-eight and had saved enough money from gold panning to travel the world. It was a five-year trip to every continent. In Australia, her last stop before returning to Canada, she met a man she liked and thought about maybe starting a family with. But when she got pregnant, he made it clear she was on her own. Dallas, being someone who always kept her expectations low, took on the challenge with great enthusiasm.
She gave birth to Ian Layne Wagner in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was a single mom when that was frowned upon, but it was her courage, intelligence, and resourcefulness that kept her out of poverty and Ian in good hands.
Other parents didn’t know how to take Dallas. Consequently, she had only a few friends, my father among them. He understood Dallas. He didn’t judge her. He had been a veteran of the Second World War and around the block more than once. He always said you could trust her. They drank together, shared stories, and were two people who found common ground in their friendship.
The kids in the neighbourhood liked and respected her. It wasn’t fear. It was a general understanding that there was something deeper in her soul — a person who was hurt as a child and still forgave and shared her love regardless of how she was treated. She wasn’t perfect by any means, but she knew this was a journey, and at times a rough one. She learned in Southeast Asia, through Buddhism, to help anyone she could. The world, she believed, was far more complicated than Judeo-Christian beliefs had led people to believe.
A family — a mother, father, daughter, and grandmother — moved into the apartment building in the summer of 1976. It was quickly realized by the children that something was off about the girl’s grandmother because she ran everywhere she went. She didn’t speak, and she wore the same clothes all the time: a simple dress that was either grey or black.
Then one Saturday in the laundry room, Dallas saw something on the elderly woman that saddened her deeply: numbers tattooed on her arm. She was one of the few who had survived Auschwitz.
That day, while the usual street hockey game was going on and Dallas was serving lemonade to the kids, she gathered us around and said, “I want you to understand something about Mrs. Myer, Rosa’s grandmother. She is broken by things that happened to her when she was a young girl. Please treat her with care and respect.”
“Why?” said one of the kids.
“Because she needs that from us. All of us.”
As Dallas said this, a tear rolled down her face. We never made fun of Mrs. Myer again.
Dallas lived next door to a First World War veteran who everyone called Lucky. It was later discovered by my dad, who was good friends with him, that it was a nickname given to him by the soldiers in the trenches. He had climbed up and over so many times, more than enough to count, but never caught a bullet from the Germans. He survived three years in France against the Kaiser’s soldiers physically unscathed.
He had married after the war four times, but no woman could handle the drinking, the waking up to his screaming, or his terrible mood swings.
Lucky would yell to Dallas in the parking lot, “You should come live with me. I’ll make an honest woman of you.”
To which she would reply, “That ship sailed a long time ago!”
They would both laugh.
The old soldier was dying, and it was Dallas who cared for him — making him food, cleaning his apartment, listening to his stories of how his friends died in his arms on the battlefield. When he would wake her up screaming in the middle of the night, she would enter his apartment and hold him while he cried. She asked for nothing in return.
When Lucky died, he was penniless. Dallas organized his service and paid for his burial out of her own pocket, refusing my father’s donation.
Dallas worked the concession stand at the baseball park, making hotdogs and hamburgers with fried onions. I can still smell them after all these years. When the team needed equipment and uniforms and were short on cash, a meeting was held at our school gym. The discussion focused on bake sales, car washes, or maybe some kind of children’s lottery.
Dallas strolled into the meeting at school and dropped four ounces of panned gold on the table.
“If there’s anything left over, put it towards the end-of-season banquet,” she declared in her straw hat and gumboots, like she had just arrived from a gardening job.
The seventies gave way to the eighties. We were still playing road hockey in the cul-de-sac. Dallas was still serving lemonade. School was out for the summer. June had become July. It was a hot day. A car was down the block, a copper-brown ’72 Plymouth Fury, just sitting there with a man behind the wheel watching the street hockey game. We all noticed him but gave it no attention.
Dallas, on the other hand, got up from her chair and walked straight for the vehicle, which backed up, turned around, and drove away. Dallas stood there for a few minutes watching the man drive off. When she came back, her demeanor had changed. She was very focused and deep in thought.
The next day, Dallas wasn’t in her usual spot, sitting and watching the kids play hockey. Me and Ian were coming home from fishing the Little Campbell River for salmon when, getting to our street some ten metres from the corner, the Plymouth Fury pulled up beside us. The man, not a large man, with deep-set blackish eyes, unshaven and with dirty hair, asked with a grin, “Hey boys, you want to make some money?”
“How much money?” said Ian.
“I just need a guy who can work a few hours. Just one of you. Ten bucks an hour,” said the grubby man, smiling.
Dallas appeared from around the corner. The man didn’t see her until she was right by his driver-side window.
“Boys, go home,” she said in a tone of no uncertainty.
Ian looked like he wanted to disobey her but thought twice about that, and we went to join the hockey game. Dallas put her hands on the opening edge of the driver’s side window and said in a very serious tone, “What business do you have here?”
The driver replied, “Whatever business I have, it’s none of yours.”
This brought out a rising anger in her. Dallas took off her glasses and looked straight into the driver’s eyes with so much intensity that the driver pulled back a bit in his seat.
“I know what you are, and you’re not going to get what you want here.”
A woman across the street, Mrs. Walters, was pushing her newborn in her stroller and suddenly stopped at the corner. Dallas went on to say, “Leave here now, or else.”
“Or else what?” said the man defiantly.
Dallas backed off the car and stood her ground with a level of temerity that gave way to a strange, terrifying calm — like a warrior who understands their opponent and his cowardice. Then she pulled her shirt up just enough to reveal the handle of a revolver that Lucky had given her before he passed away. It was old and had no bullets, but it was enough to bluff the man into quickly peeling out, tires squealing as he did a U-turn in the street.
A piece of paper flew out of his car and landed by Mrs. Walters, who picked it up. She hated litter.
It was a business card that read: Clifford Olsen, handyman. No job too small.