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Purple Gas and Jesse James
by Jaron Summers

In Coronation, Alberta, there were two kinds of gasoline.

One kind was legal for ordinary sinners. The other was purple.

Purple gas was meant for farmers and farm equipment, which made sense because farmers had machinery the size of apartment blocks and fuel bills that could make a grown man stare at the horizon and mutter about Ottawa. The gas was cheaper because it carried less tax. It was also dyed purple so even the dimmest bureaucrat could tell if somebody had grown too fond of agricultural privilege.

This led to an obvious problem.

In Coronation, population 950, almost everyone knew a farmer, was a farmer, or was related to someone who drank like one. So the existence of cheaper purple gas posed the sort of moral challenge our prairie town was not fully equipped to resist.

Coronation also had a water tower—a great silver bullet on four spindly legs rising over the town like a threat from God or a signal to passing aliens. As a boy, I was certain it was one or the other. I once tried to climb it.

That’s when I met Jesse James.

His last name was James. I called him Jesse, which seemed accurate and also guaranteed I would be boxed about the ears. He helped the police and believed civilization depended on keeping boys off water towers and purple gas out of private vehicles.

On the matter of water towers, he was right.

He caught me halfway up and delivered a firm correction to my ears—less a beating than a public service announcement.

“If you’re going to kill yourself,” the gesture implied, “do it lower down.”

I took the lesson to heart. From that day forward, I confined my more ambitious thinking to ground level.

Which is where the purple gas problem lived.

I was about twelve when I began to understand that adults, for all their height and neckties, often lacked imagination. They obeyed rules, complained about rules, drank because of rules, and once in a while got themselves elected mayor while barely able to stand upright.

But very few of them looked at a system and thought: There must be a side door.

That was where I came in.

I won’t go into the mechanics of anything—partly because I’m older now, and partly because governments, unlike writers, have no sense of humor. Let’s just say I developed an early interest in the difference between appearance and reality.

From time to time, the RCMP would set up roadblocks outside town.

This gave the whole affair a festive air, like a church picnic run by suspicious men with badges.

Drivers approached with faces carefully arranged somewhere between innocence and mild indigestion. The Mounties would inspect tanks, peer into vehicles, and generally behave as if they expected to find purple gas, stolen livestock, and possibly a Communist under a tarp.

Most people feared these roadblocks.

I regarded them as a design challenge.

And somehow, despite all the inspections, Jesse James—who could keep a boy off a water tower—never seemed to find very much purple gas.

I admired that.

Not because I had anything against the police, although I did have a philosophical objection to ear-boxing. No, I admired it because it confirmed something I had already begun to suspect:

Authority is often theatrical.

It wears a hat, sets up a barrier, asks stern questions, and examines what it knows how to examine. But life, especially in a place like Coronation, tends to seep around the edges.

That was Coronation all over.

A town where almost nothing happened—except the parts that did.

Take Mr. Price.

Saturday morning, 1957. I’m fifteen. Late spring. The prairie air, touched with clover, wakes me like a gentle accusation: get up, you’re alive.

It’s a dandy day to be alive.

The front of our home is my father’s dental office. The back is where we live. We have two bathrooms, one faintly perfumed with ether—a luxury in Coronation.

My father drinks every evening.

Mother says he drinks to excess. He says he drinks to capacity.

Our house is wrapped in tar paper, waiting for stucco. Every spring, Mother suggests finishing it. Every spring, my father explains that the foundation must settle. He fears earthquakes. The last seismic event in our part of Alberta was sometime before the dinosaurs.

That morning, I ride to Price’s Food Market for my shift.

Mr. Price doesn’t like me much. He thinks I talk too much. He has threatened to shoot me several times, but always in a friendly way.

I go to the flour shed.

I hear a sound.

There’s a man sitting on the floor in the shadows.

Boots I recognize.

A rifle.

Blood pooling on the wood.

“Don’t m-murder me, Mr. Price,” I whisper. “I’ll stop talking so much. My mother will really m-miss me.”

He looks at me. A faint smile. Then away.

I understand.

I run.

The rest unfolds quickly—phone calls, a doctor, a café full of men who suddenly remember they are citizens, and me leading them like a prairie Pied Piper to the shed.

By ten that morning, Mr. Price is at the hospital.

He will not survive the day.

Later, over soup, my father says, “It’s remarkable how often people die by their own hand in Coronation.”

“Is that why we moved here?” I ask.

“Let’s talk about something happy,” says my mother.

My father looks at me and says, “You’ll probably get paid for the full day.”

“That’ll be dandy,” I say.

But I’m thinking about Mr. Price.

About how quiet his store will be.

About the cinnamon buns he left out that morning—still warm, still perfect.

And I wonder if, before he pulled the trigger, he had one last bun.

I would have.

Years later, I became a writer.

Which is another way of saying I never lost interest in what’s really in the tank.