by Brian Doyle
Each key on the organ downstairs near the altar is attached to one of these pipes.
The pipes that are as big as stovepipes are the low notes. The tiny pipes at the other end are the high notes.
There’s a step ladder here to change the tops of the big stovepipe notes, they’re so high.
“Now you boys wait here and don’t you dare touch anything! Just stand there and I’ll be right back,” says Mr. George. He goes out of the loft and shuts the door. Then the lights go out.
Soon Mr. George is down at the organ. You can see him sitting down there through the slats in the wall. Now tiny notes start coming out of the smallest pipes, the little whistles, lots of teeny, high notes running up and down like pretty water falls or teensy rain tinkling.
Now the bigger pipes start playing, like bugles and car horns and the factory whistle at the paper mill. And the noise in the nearly pitch dark room is starting to hurt our ears.
Now it gets louder, and the notes get lower now and the bigger pipes are blowing and sounding like bulls howling and trains whistling and I can see the shadows of the summer boys putting their hands over their ears. Now the biggest pipes start to pound and bellow and rumble like thunder and crash and roll and explode like earthquakes and volcanoes and the whole room is shaking and vibrating and shuddering and the low notes are coming up our legs and into our hearts and boiling into my brain until my whole body is shaking and I’m falling apart and the floor cracks open and the room comes tumbling down around us.
All of a sudden everything stops. The silence is ringing away.
I just stepped off a cliff into space.
The light goes on.
Mr. George opens the door.
“Wasn’t that fun, my summer boys? Now, let’s go down with Mr. Skippy and sing our brave little hearts out, shall we?”
13
The Show
AT THE FRANÇAIS theater today there’s a big lineup to go and see Double Indemnity starring Billy’s favorite actor, Fred MacMurray. We’ve already seen it. Fred MacMurray is Billy’s favorite actor because he looks just like Captain Marvel. Or Captain Marvel looks like Fred MacMurray. Which is which?
“Captain Marvel has lived forever. He’s immortal,” says Billy. “So it must be that he came first. So you have to say that Fred MacMurray looks like Captain Marvel.”
“How did he do that?” I say. “How do you get to look like somebody like Captain Marvel?”
“I guess you have to really try hard,” says Billy.
Of course, Fred MacMurray doesn’t wear a red suit with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest and a white cape with yellow trim and yellow boots.
Fred in Double Indemnity wears a suit just like my father wears to go and work in the Silver Service. But he has big eyebrows and a square chin and hair the color of ink just like Captain Marvel.
In the movie, a woman with a long nose named Barbara Stanwyck gets Fred to murder her husband Edward G. Robinson. What a sucker Fred is.
Billy and me, we’ve got thirty cents. I have the quarter I got from Mr. George. Billy’s got the nickel Mr. George flipped to him for not getting caught and reaching the wall.
We need some more money.
We want to go to the White Tower restaurant and order two orders of French fried potato chips and two cherry Cokes and then go to the Rat Hole theater and get two large popcorns and two medium-sized Orange Crushes.
Here’s the money we need:
Two French fries
2 × .10 = .20
Two cherry Cokes
2 × .6 = .12
Two tickets to Rat Hole
2 × .10 = .20
Two popcorns
2 × .5 = .10
Two Orange Crushes
2 × .5 = .10
Total
.72
Money we have from Mr. George:
.30
Money we need:
.42
We go down the alley behind the Français theater and look up to see if the fire-escape door has got the stick in it to hold it open. It has.
I have a plan.
I have my fishing line and lead weight with me that I use for sneaking into the show without paying. I flip the weight up and around the iron ladder and we pull it down.
I go around to the front of the theater and walk up and down the lineup. Right away I’m lucky! There’s Dick Dork and Dumb Doug.
I tell them that instead of paying thirteen cents to get in to see Double Indemnity, I can get them in for ten cents. They give me their dimes and I take them around the back and tell them to wait there with Billy until I find two more.
It doesn’t take long.
It’s easy to find two kids who want to save three cents each. Six cents can buy you some nice chocolate-covered raisins. I get their dimes.
Around the back I explain to them that they all have to go in together. I tell them they have to crawl in and stay low and roll into the aisle. I tell them about the curtain. How you have to grab the bottom of it.
“If you don’t hold the curtain,” I say, “it will blow and light will come in and the ushers will come, and you’ll get slapped around and then they’ll throw you out.”
The kids are looking scared. Scared and excited.
Up they go.
When they reach the landing, we let the ladder go and it rises up out of reach.
“Do you think they’ll make it?” Billy says.
“If they do as they’re told they will,” I say.
On the landing, they’re crouched together. It looks like they are trying to decide who’s going in first. Looks like they’ve picked Dumb Doug because he’s the biggest.
Instead of crawling in like I told him, Dumb Doug grabs the door, opens it wide and walks in. The other three walk in behind him.
Billy and me, we round the corner and hide and peek. Sure enough, very soon an usher sticks his head out the fire-escape door and looks around. Then the door shuts. No stick to hold it open for some fresh air.
Today’s going to be extra hot in the Français theater, for sure. And stinking. All the perfume and smelly feet and cigarettes and farts and stale popcorn.
We go around the front and cross the street and watch the ushers come out dragging the four kids by their shirts. Kicked out.
We walk up Dalhoozie and go into the White Tower restaurant. The White Tower is not a tower. It’s just a small little square building with a fake castle turret on each corner. The roof is so low Buz Sawyer could probably reach up and put his hand on it.
Inside there are five red stools at the counter.
The French fried potatoes smell delicious, specially with the vinegar and the salt. We can’t get cherry Cokes, because we’re two cents short. Ordinary Cokes will do.
“I feel sort of bad,” says Billy. “That they got caught.”
I don’t say anything.
“Do you feel bad?” says Billy.
I look right at him. Should I, Granny? Look at this face and believe what I say.
“No, I don’t feel bad,” I lie. “Serves them right. They didn’t do what they were told.”
We walk up past the Union Station and the Chateau Laurier. There’s a small parade with drums and a trombone and some soldiers who just came home from the war that is almost over.
There are kids riding the iron horses of the War Memorial.
On Sparks Street there’s a big fight in front of Bowie’s Lunch. There are soldiers rolling on the ground and police and girls screaming. The big window of Bowie s Lunch is crashed in and there’s glass all over Sparks Street. There are people still sitting in the restaurant eating mashed potatoes and talking about the fight.
There’s a sailor kissing a girl near the shattered window. Further up Sparks Street I see my father. He’s going into the Household Finance Company. He doesn’t see me. My mother and father fight all the time about the Household Finance Company.
There’s a part of the Ottawa Journal on the sidewalk on Bank Street. I pick i
t up and start to read what’s written there. I have to. I can’t help it.
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! When it is 90 degrees in the shade where you are there is a place only six miles away that is 60 degrees below zero! Where is it?
"Banana skins fried in cold cream taste something like
French fried potatoes!” (says prisoner of war for 3 years)
Will the earth blow up? Atomic war next?
The human body has 206 bones and 696 muscles
Page turner for organist wanted
Soldiers met at Lansdowne Park
The Rat Hole theater on Bank Street is really the Rialto theater but everybody calls it the Rat Hole because they say when you sit there in the dark you can feel the rats jumping around your ankles fighting for the popcorn and candy on the floor down there.
Three Alan Ladd movies today for ten cents!
What a bargain!
Billy and me, we present a little toast to Mr. George with our Orange Crushes. There is no clink when our glasses touch for the toast because our glasses are made of paper.
Not like in the movies.
Alan Ladd is up there on the screen.
Right away the screen goes brown and Alan Ladd disappears and soon we can smell smoke and the lights go on and everybody’s yelling and a man comes out on the stage in front of the screen and tells us there’ll only be two Alan Ladd movies instead of three because one of them just burned up in the projection room and that’s that and if anybody wants their money back well, too bad, you’re not getting it back and now here’s two really good Alan Ladd movies coming up so enjoy yourselves or go to hell home, he doesn’t care one way or another…
In the movie The Glass Key Alan Ladd wears a long coat with wide shoulders and a hat like my father’s hat. He almost never takes off the hat and coat.
He has his hat off once when he’s half dead in the hospital bed. And once he has his hat and coat off when the bad guy, William Bendix, is throwing him up against the wall like a rubber ball and another time when two other bad guys try to drown him in a tub of ice water.
William Bendix puts a whole onion in a sandwich and stuffs it in his mouth all at once he’s such a pig and meanwhile Alan Ladd sets fire to a mattress he’s tied to and crashes out a window and down through a glass skylight and escapes. His face is a mess but the next day in the hospital Veronica Lake comes in with her hair falling down over her eye and Alan Ladd is his handsome old self again and you can tell by the music and the way her curly lips are about two stories high on the screen that she wants to kiss him more than anything else in the world. “SHAZAM!” whispers Billy.
I’m thinking about a girl I remember at York Street School, Geranium Mayburger, who had her very own picture of Alan Ladd in a frame with glass her mother bought her for her birthday at Woolworth’s on Rideau. Geranium had the picture on her desk and was kissing it when the teacher, Mr. Blue Cheeks, was telling us the history of the war and he saw her and everything went quiet for a while and then he turned purple and grabbed it from her and smashed it into the wastebasket.
In the other movie, This Gun for Hire, Alan Ladd is a nice bad guy who gets up in the morning with all his clothes on, gives his little kitten some milk in a saucer and then shoots a guy and also the guy’s secretary who is trying to make him a cup of coffee.
Veronica Lake does magic tricks while she’s singing to old drunks sitting at tables. Alan Ladd gets on a train with Veronica Lake who’s a spy for the war.
Veronica gets a twisted ankle and her hair falls over her right eye and her mouth gets quite curly. A fat guy who eats peppermints all the time is a traitor and the cops come and gun down Alan Ladd who can’t sleep because his cat died.
Veronica Lake says, “You saved my life,” and Alan Ladd, even though he’s dead, says, “Thanks!” for some reason and that’s the end.
We walk up Sparks Street past the Bowie’s Lunch smashed window. There’s a big board covering the window and all the broken glass is gone. Down the street the Salvation Army is playing some music. Near the War Memorial somebody’s making a speech and there’s lots of soldiers and girls around.
Up Rideau Street Billy goes into the public library and I go on ahead home. I look in Imbro’s Restaurant window at some people eating ice cream sundaes. If I had any money left I’d buy one. Maybe Mr. George tonight at choir will give me another quarter.
He seems to be a nice man.
What he did with the choir cat and his cape.
How he cut the cape so the cat wouldn’t have to wake up.
14
A Bad Bing Crosby Habit
EVERYBODY’S EXCITED. Horseballs mother won an electric stove. Worth two hundred dollars! At the Monster Bingo last night. It only cost her fifty cents to play twenty-one games. Fifty cents for a brand new shiny stove!
The stove is on the sidewalk in front of Laflamme’s. Everybody’s crowded around looking at it, feeling it. It’s so shiny and white. It’s a Westinghouse — the best kind, somebody says.
Horseballs mother can’t stop telling everybody about the bingo. How hot it was there at the Auditorium. How they had big fans blowing air over blocks of ice to cool off the bingo players so they wouldn’t sweat so much all over the bingo cards and have the cards always sticking to their arms.
Some of Horseballs sisters pretend they’re cooking stuff on the stove.
“I’ll cook the supper!” “No, I’ll cook the supper!” “No, I will!”
They’re shoving each other out of the way.
Now Horseball s father and some of the brothers lift up the stove and take it into the house.
“Careful now!” says Mrs. Laflamme, “Careful you don’t scratch the new stove on the door frame. Careful!” Horseball’s father and his brothers bang the brand-new stove three times on the doorway on the way in. Everybody’s yelling and pushing. They’re trying to be the first back in the house after the stove. Some of the small Laflammes climb in the front window. Some are already in the house. They lean out the upstairs windows and shout about the stove and wrestle.
Horseball dumps a pot of water on everybody from the window. There’s a big argument about who did it. Everybody’s shouting and laughing and running around.
Soon they’ll all be back in the house. I could get in line and live with them. Pretend I’m one of the Laflammes.
Back in my house there’s torn pages of magazines all over the floor. Phil loves to rip paper. My father says that’s how Phil reads. “Tonight,” my father often says, “maybe I’ll get to read the paper before Phil does!”
My mother’s in the kitchen doing the washing. Phil’s diapers are going through the wringer. The wringer is like a strange underwater animal with rollers for lips that eat wet cloth. The rollers pull the diapers through, roll the cloth through the tight lips and squeeze out the water.
What it would be like to get your hand caught in there? Pull your arm right in. Wring out your arm.
The diapers fall into a tub and then I take the tub out the back and hang Phil’s diapers on the clothesline to dry and to be put on him again.
My job.
The torn magazines are National Geographies.
That my granny left for me.
At least he didn’t tear my two favorite ones — the one about the beautiful Aztec boy and the one about the trap door spider that scares me so much I start to shake.
Outside, Mr. Lipshitz is there with his wagon. Some of the Laflamme boys bring out their old electric stove and throw it up into his wagon. The wagon sags a bit and the old horse jumps and says something.
Mr. Lipshitz counts some change out of his little black purse.
I call on Billy but he’s gone ahead.
I cross Angel Square to go to choir this time. So I can see some of the lacrosse game.
In the winter on Angel Square there are always fights. But not in the summer. There’s no school in the summer.
There’s a pretty big crowd at the lacrosse game. There are two good playe
rs that everybody cheers for. One of them is the smallest on the field. The other one is the biggest. The small one is a little Pea Soup they call Sixpouce. Sixpouce means six inches. Whenever Sixpouce gets the ball in his stick everybody goes wild cheering. Sixpouce is as quick and tricky as a chipmunk.
The biggest player is a big Dogan they call Goliath. Whenever Goliath gets the ball in his stick everybody says, “Oooooo,” and, “Oh no, it’s Goliath, run for your lives!”
I’m standing beside a family. There’s the father and the mother and the two boys — two brothers. The mother’s belly is high like my mother’s. There’s another brother or sister in there waiting to come out and be in the family.
One of the brothers, the older one, is cheering for Sixpouce. The younger brother is cheering for Goliath.
“Come on, Goliath!”
“Come on, Sixpouce!”
Now Sixpouce has the ball in his stick. He runs toward Goliath. Goliath is going to knock him silly and take the ball from him.
Then Sixpouce does something that makes everybody gasp! He ducks and runs right between Goliath’s legs and escapes and scores!
The two brothers look at each other. They can’t believe it.
The crowd is going wild.
The brothers pretend they are Goliath and Sixpouce.
The younger one crawls between the older one’s legs. Their mother and father look at them and laugh. The father laughs and leans and ruffles the boys, hugs the boys. Maybe I could go and live with them.
I often feel like this. Wanting, wondering what it would be like to live in someone else’s house.
I leave the game and walk up York Street to King Edward Avenue and up to choir.
I go down the dark stairs to the choir chamber. I hang on to the round wooden railing. It is smooth and larger than my hand. I’m not late so I don’t need to skip step number nine.
Just on time.
“Ah!” says Mr. Skippy. “Look, Mr. George, who has arrived to make our ensemble complete! Shall we begin, Mr. George?”