Sugar Rush

Old fossils never die, do they Sonja Wood ? – pt. 5

Everybody who knew McCluskey Number Two agreed: this was a man of towering intellect, but the great mind had been evicted from the premises long before Sonja showed up. The reality was not a laughing matter – he was a former academic man, retired to Wolfville, and given to excessive drink. He was also artistic in many ways; as a gift for Sonja, he did this painting of a pheasant, a watercolor. It’s hangs on our pantry door, and I can’t resist sharing a quick photo (below). But as time went on, he drank himself insane. Twenty-three years-old, Sonja Wood was not fully aware of the mess she was getting into, and quite naturally took him under her wing.

Sometimes I tell my wife she is crazy. But this is just a word we throw around; a word that can have anywhere upwards of ten meanings.

Crazy isn’t the kind of thing one kids one’s self about. Mr. McCluskey thought he was the real live Wyatt Earp. He loved Wyatt Earp and he literally would don this leather cowboy hat and proclaim he was Wyatt; and of course, he loved his guns, his favorite sugar rush.

But he also loved Tina Turner. He had this giant poster of her fixed on the ceiling above his bed so that he could see her every morning, first thing, as soon as he opened his eyes. Then third great love of his life was golden retrievers. For decades, he had always owned one. Because of the dog, lately he worried about his health, which was not going well. If anything happened to him, who will take care of Gunnar?

After all the alcohol abuse, he suffered extreme schizophrenia, often hallucinating elaborately, so all too often he’d start shooting up the house. The cops kept confiscating the guns, and courts would call for their psychiatric evaluations, but the state of mind had been diagnosed and known for years, so they could never find him criminally liable for his actions. Sure enough, he’d head right back home, and get his hands on more guns.

McCluskey was methodical. He really hated it when the cops kept took his guns, and he started hiding them. In a bookshelf, in certain chosen books, he carved-out the pages in the shape of the pistol, which could then fit snugly inside. Sonja says he carved the books out with such incredible skill, it really spoke to the quality of the man. She would ask him though; “Why do you need to keep a gun anyway ? Who do you think would be trying to get you ? You do know how ridiculous that sounds, don’t you ?”

But waves of drink and more drink had been coming ashore for too long. These nonexistent tormentors persisted, (or so his mind insisted), and could pop if you ever dropped your guard; gunfire on the Wolfville Ridge became just another little piece of the rural ambience. 

At one point, McCluskey Two calls the RCMP himself. He warns the desk sergeant they’d “…better get down here and move all these kids out of my house ! I’ve got a shotgun ! If they don’t start leaving, I’m going to start shooting !” He stayed on the phone for quite awhile and finely argued the point. It kept coming back to the fact there were a bunch of school kids that just wouldn’t leave his house no matter what, and he doesn’t know why they continued to ignore him ? Finally, the caller grew tired of having to ‘just calm down and explain it again’, and decided to put away the shotgun. Of course the police realized it was McCluskey; he was alone in the house, and thankfully, just coming down off that sour Mountain-moonshine again. Not one of his better friends, but what he’d turn to when the pension money started running out. As became the practice, unless they heard shots, cars no longer were dispatched to his address.

The functions that lend to mental illness are not so well-understood. Raised in a sizeable city, I don’t want to ask how these wheels of the clock go ‘round. Mere curiosity would never be enough to justify me hanging out with somebody else’s sixty year-old demented cowboy father. McCluskey Two was Sonja’s new friend’s sixty year-old father, so of course, Sonja approached all of this very differently, becoming: (1) his unofficial caregiver, (2) his ad hoc legal advisor, (3) his deputy-assistant power-of-attorney, and (4) his first in-spirit-only faith-healer (he’d never met one before). I can’t imagine how she thought she was supposed to keep him on the rails, but the Sonja I Know is always in adoption mode, the same way as Jesus always loved the fallen sheep.

Within a few years he died. It was a Thursday afternoon, but because he lived alone (of course) he wasn’t discovered the same day. None of Wolfville’s seasoned veterans had ever seen anything like it, and they called Sonja, for they badly wanted to hear an explanation.

All over the walls and doors of his house, her name and phone number were scrawled in black jiffy marker: “CALL SONJA…” and “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY”, “SONJA Ph. # …”; it was over the inside of the door-jamb when you entered the house; it was written in foot-high block letters on the wall over the phone; in all, it was written in many different places throughout the house.

They probably never managed to stop that ink from bleeding through their paint, even to this day. We still use the same phone number. Is this not an omen? Is there always a beginning and end to everything?

Sonja drove over to McCluskey’s house right away, for the final time, and she collected up his big old dog. In no time at all, he then became ‘a Blue Beach dog’, with lots of new people to love him. He lived out his remaining days by the Bay, and did what happy dogs should always do. This is why it was so important, when McCluskey finally went to his Happy Hunting Grounds, why everybody had to call Sonja. Gunnar was all that really mattered now.