by Brian Doyle
We always go up there in the winter, us kids, when it’s icy, with our sleighs made of cardboard boxes, and slide. I’m imagining it’s winter and the trees are coated with clear crystal ice. But it’s not winter and it’s not ice, it’s moonlight.
Mr. George is telling me about the war and the woman he saved from drowning in France. He carried her to her house and brought her back to life and she cooked him up a big meal of truffles which are like mushrooms only better.
And then they made a fire in her fireplace.
When we were in Imbro’s waiting for our ice cream sundaes Mr. George showed me his war medals. Both medals had six points like a star. They had King George’s crown on and in a circle in the middle of the star, the words, “The France and Germany Star” and on the other one, “The Italy Star.” One had a ribbon with blue and white and red stripes. The other one had white and red and green stripes.
After they lit the fire, she took all her clothes off, I think, and hung them up to dry by the fire. Mr. George says lets go up the hill to the gazebo, see what the moonlight looks like from up there.
There’s no bench there. I want to sit down. Mr. George wants me to stay standing up. He’s fiddling with his pants. I can see him in the dark.
In the war, while the clothes were drying, Mr. George said the woman he saved had lots of nice hair between her legs.
“Do you have any hair between your legs?” says Mr. George.
“I’m dizzy,” I say. “I want to sit down.”
He says I’m such a good singer in the choir. The best singer in the choir. He wants to give me a hug because I’m such a good singer. I can’t see his face.
Then he doesn’t give me a hug. He pulls me behind one of the stone pillars of the gazebo.
“Shh!” he says. “There’s somebody coming. Some boys. We don’t want them to hear us. I don’t like those boys.”
We hide behind the pillar. The moon is shining along the side of the hill. The boys are wrestling up and down the hill and laughing. In the moonlight each boy has a shadow wrestling the shadow of another boy. They wrestle and push down the hill and into the dark under the big trees. Its quiet again.
“Let’s go down under the big trees and sit on one of the benches down there. It’s a beautiful moonlit night and you don’t have to go home just yet,” says Mr. George.
We go down the hill and he takes my hand. His hand is big. Bigger than my father’s. Bigger than Ketchy Balls’.
“You are a beautiful boy,” he says. “Maybe you’ll sing for me.”
We sit on the bench under the big trees. The moonlight is on the hill and over the leaves of the big trees above us. The boards of the bench feel rough on my legs. If I move back it’s better. When I move back I have to push my toes into the small stones on the walk in front of us. Some of the moon shows between the leaves of the big trees above us and shines on the small stones like jewels.
“If you sing for me,” says Mr. George, “I’ll give you one of my war medals. Sing that Bing Crosby song…”
“Moonlight becomes you,” I sing softly. “It goes with your hair.. .You certainly know the right things to wear…”
He puts his left arm around my back and his hand into the left pocket of my shorts and pushes his fingers between my legs.
“How’s yours?” he’s whispering. “How’s yours?” He takes my right hand in his hand and puts it in his lap. There’s something there like the railing going down the dark back stairs to the choir room.
“Keep going, O’Boy! Oh, boy, keep going!”
He’s whispering loud and rough.
The moon stares through the leaves at us.
He pulls me tight against him with his left arm so I can hardly breathe.
“I can’t breathe,” I try to yell. There’s wet on my wrist and on my arm.
Now there’s a crunching sound along the path.
Footsteps in the dark coming. Crunching.
Mr. George gets up off the bench so fast he knocks me onto the path. He disappears behind the big tree behind our bench. Two people come along the walk. I get back on the bench. The boy and the girl stop under the park light up the path. They kiss each other. Now they walk closer. My knee is cut from the stones. They stop right in front of my bench and he kisses her. They don’t even notice me. I don’t breathe. They start walking again. I get off the bench and walk after them. I catch up to them but on the grass — no crunching. I try to keep my shoes from flap slapping.
When I’m far enough away from Mr. George’s hiding tree I duck into the bushes and trip on my shoes and roll into some cobwobbly sticky stuff. I’m rolling in it and the dirt and dead leaves and twigs and bugs and spider webs. It’s all between my fingers and around my arms and in my hair and around my legs and in my face. I’m in a huge spider’s web and rolling around under the bushes.
Now it’s Mr. George whispering as loud as he can.
“Boyo! Boy O’Boy! Where are you? Come out! Don’t be afraid! I won’t hurt you! Boyo! I love you!”
I can’t get my breath. Sticky strings of web are covering my mouth and nose. I’m afraid I’m going to scream.
There’s an opening in the hedge I’m under. I roll through it down a steep bank onto the sidewalk and over the curb into a muddy puddle in the gutter. The puddle is slimy and greasy and I can smell car oil and dog turds.
I see Mr. George thrash his way out of the hedge in the dark between two streetlights. I lie still in the gutter and sidespy up at him. He’s looking up and down Heney Street, calling now, “Boyo! Boy O’Boy! Don’t hide on me!”
He seems afraid, the way he’s looking back and forward. Back and forward. This way. That way.
“Boyo!”
He pushes back into the hedge. Maybe I’m still in there.
Here come the lovers again. They’re on the sidewalk right where I’m lying. They’re having another hug. Haven’t they had enough hugs? What’s the matter with them, anyway? Now they’re kissing again.
I come out of my puddle on my hands and knees. Now I stand up. I’m like something out of a horror comic coming out of a slimy lagoon. A creature. The girl screams. The boy jumps back. He takes her hand and pulls her down the street.
I run down Heney Street to Cobourg.
I stop to get my breath in front of Lachaine’s store. Mrs. Sawyer comes out. She has a bag in her arm with a loaf of bread sticking out.
“Good evening, Martin,” she says, surprise in her voice and comes over to me. I’m looking in Lachaine’s window at the stuff in there. Potatoes and hard candy and bars of soap and caps for cap guns and yo-yos and black and red licorice and shoelaces and bobby pins for your hair and a box of red beets. And Lachaine’s black store cat asleep curled in the corner.
And I am also looking at myself in the glass.
“How are you this evening, Martin O’Boy?” says Mrs. Sawyer.
I look up at her.
“Why are you crying?” says Mrs. Sawyer.
“I’m not crying,” I say. “I don’t think.”
“You seem to be crying,” she says.
“There’s something in my eye maybe,” I say.
“Is there something in both your eyes?”
I guess so.
“You have to be very careful of your eyes,” says Mrs. Sawyer. “They’re the only eyes you have.” She goes back a step and looks me up and down. “And your knee is bleeding. Bleeding bad. You’d better be going on home now. It’s getting late, don’t you think? What have you been doing? Look at you!”
“I’m… I was fighting after choir. Just playing. Wrestling in the park. After choir. Play fighting. Like we used to do with Buz.
“You’d better come home. I’ll walk with you. Your mother’s going to be worried…”
“I’m going in the store…and then I’m going right home…”
“Your mother’s going to be worried.. .you look like you just lost your best friend…” She turns and moves away. “Straight home now,” she calls back.
>
I pretend to go into the store but I don’t.
After a while I go down Cobourg and to my house at 3 Papineau. I stand at the door. I don’t want to cry. I’ll show my mother my knee but I won’t cry. I’ll tell her about fighting after choir. She’ll see my knee and take care of it.
I open the door. The door to the house where I don’t want to live.
Please, somebody. Take care of me. Love me.
18
The Riddle and a Letter
WE’RE EATING bacon for breakfast this morning. My fathers late for work so he’s eating the bacon standing up. The bacon is a bit burnt. My mother and father just had a big fight about it. My mothers gone back upstairs with Phil. Phil howled all the way up. He always howls when my parents fight.
He’s howling now. Lenny Lipshitz can probably hear him all the way down at number nine.
“You know,” my father says, “your mother once went to the doctor to have her head examined but they couldn’t find anything.”
It’s an old joke. I’ve heard it many times.
I give Cheap a piece of bacon under the table.
“Don’t feed that cat bacon. It’s expensive,” my father says.
I look in my father’s face. I don’t say what I’m thinking.
“He doesn’t care about you, you know,” my father says. “He only cares about food.”
“Cheap likes me, I can tell,” I say.
“Animals aren’t like people. Cats don’t act like people. People like you or they don’t like you. Cats just care about food.”
“I think Cheap loves me,” I say. “The way he looks at me. With his ripped-out ear like that.”
“Are you the one who feeds him?” my father says.
“When I eat, he eats. I feed him off my plate. Nobody else feeds him but me. He’s my cat. He gets what I get.”
Cheap’s looking out from under the table up at my father. Cheap doesn’t like my father. You can tell the way he puts his good ear down. And his eyes wide open. He’s waiting to see if my father’s going to kick something. His legs are ready to get himself out of the way. A flying basin goes bouncing one way, Cheap will head the other way.
And when Old Faithful gushes, Cheap is already gone.
“He only cares about you because you’re the one who feeds him,” my father says, putting on his hat to go to work.
No, that’s not true. He loves me. I can tell when I talk to him and he closes his eyes. Squeezes them shut. Like he’s having a good time.
“Cheap is a joke for a cat. As far as I’m concerned, this cat is just a waste of fur. And don’t feed him bacon. Bacon is expensive!”
My father slams out the door.
He didn’t even notice my slashed knee.
Cheap is staring up at me.
I pick him up and he gives me a little purr.
“You’re not a joke,” I say to him and give him some more bacon.
“And you’re not a waste of fur. Maybe somebody we know is a waste of skin! What do you think of that?”
Cheap agrees.
I’m sitting on our front step with my wool sweater pulled around me. Cheap sits with me.
Cheap saw what happened last night.
Last night Phil got his arm caught in the wringer.
Soon as I got in the house to show my mother my slashed knee I heard Phil starting to howl. I ran in the kitchen and bumped into my mother’s belly. Phil’s hand was coming out of the other side of the wringer. The lips eating Phil. My mother started pounding the safety bar. The safety bar on top of the wringer to release Phil. Phil being gobbled up.
Hit the safety bar hard! We were hitting it, my mother and me.
“Hit it! Hit it!” my mother was screaming. Phil was making choking noises and biting his tongue, chewing on his tongue. Phil’s arm was halfway through when the wringer snapped open and Phil fell back and his arm slid out like a piece of raw meat.
Then we held Phil while my mother ran cold water over his arm and bathed it gently with soap and rinsed the flesh some more. Phil was staring straight ahead. No sounds.
“He’s in shock,” she said. “We have to wrap him up warm. We’ll get the doctor tomorrow.”
We wrapped Phil's arm in clean cloths and I made him some warm cocoa and we put him gentle into his iron bed and my mother lay down with him and held him and he sobbed some and my mother sang him a song:
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To give her poor dog a bone
When she got there
The cupboard was bare
And so her poor dog had none.
After Phil was asleep, she whispered to me, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Then she noticed my knee. “You’ve cut your knee,” she said. “Put some iodine on it and I’ll look at it tomorrow…and maybe you should have a bath. You’re filthy. What have you been doing anyway? I thought you were at choir. I hope you haven’t been misbehaving.. .remember.. .the one we’re counting on…”
Soon she was asleep too. Mother and Phil cuddled up.
I had a bath, put on the iodine, went to bed and had this awful dream. A boy (me) is swimming in the Rideau River at Dutchie’s Hole, near where my granny used to live. Another boy (Phil) is standing on the shore. The water around the boy is full of floating pigs’ heads and guts and turds from the slaughterhouse. The boy spits in the water. The boy on the shore yells, “Stop spitting in the water, you’re spoiling everything for the other swimmers!” My granny, who is standing on an iron train bridge, is calling out to the boy not to listen to this foolishness. The boy in the water yells, “Phil, you’re ruining everything, not me!”
On the steps this morning I’m reading things from the Ottawa Journal to Cheap while I’m hugging my knees. The enamel basin is on the sidewalk in front of Lenny Lipshitz’s place three doors down. I’ll get it after.
I read to Cheap that so far, 45 million people got killed in the war that is just about over. I wonder where they put all the bodies. How many big black cars came.
Eh, Granny?
I read to Cheap about my father’s razor blades. Blue Gillette Blades — the sharpest, smoothest finished edges ever honed. That must be why my father cuts himself all the time. Little pieces of white toilet paper stuck to his face with a spot of red.
I read to Cheap about the Carnation Milk Baby. His picture is on every can of Carnation Milk. The most beautiful baby in the Dominion of Canada.
My granny said I could have been that baby but there was no picture of me to send.
I read about the atomic bomb. A new bomb that is very small but could blow up a whole city and everybody in it. Kill everybody.
Will the whole world blow up eventually, the paper says. They can drop the bomb from 6 miles up in the air where it’s always very cold.
That’s it! The answer to the riddle in Ripley’s Believe or Not!
I read my horoscope to Cheap who is asleep beside me.
My father calls it horrorscope. “LEO. You will, in the next few days, come into a large bounty.” Bounty means money or riches. I read that in the National Geographic about the Aztecs. Next I’m reading about a crazy millionaire who comes to Ottawa sometimes from Merrickville and goes to the Union Station when the soldiers come home from the war on the train and gives out fifty-dollar bills to the heroes coming home…
Oh, no! Here come the ketchup lady and the turkey lady.
“There you are! Good morning, Martin. How are you?” says the turkey lady.
I don’t answer but I say this, “I’m thinking of a riddle. Where is it so hot where you are that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk but there is a place only six miles away that is 60 degrees below zero. Where is it?”
“Mmm,” says the turkey lady, “how fascinating. Let me see…” The ketchup lady is looking at my shoes. My shoes are filthy from last night. They don’t look new anymore.
“You got the shoes,” says the ketchup lady. “Good. Where did the shoes come from? Ar
e they someone else’s shoes?”
“No, they’re not someone else’s shoes, they’re my shoes.”
“But they’re not new shoes…”
“Yes, they are. New shoes. My new shoes.” I’m giving her my honest face as hard as I can. The face that people will always want to believe.
“Did you see that enamel basin down the street there? In front of number nine? My father kicked that basin all the way down there. Our basin.”
“Oh, my…”
“And the riddle?” says the turkey lady. “Is it a trick question?”
“No trick,” I say. “Just look up.”
They both look up.
While they’re both looking up, my door opens and my mother comes out. Then the three go in the house to talk about me. And maybe the enamel basin…
I feel invisible.
Along comes Billy. He starts telling me about Mr. George. How Mr. George told him he is going to play a special piece on the organ at a church service one Sunday morning. Not a choir piece. But a special piece — just Mr. George. I don’t tell Billy about what happened last night. I don’t tell Billy how I hate Mr. George.
The mailman goes by.
Nothing for us. He looks at my shoes.
“Quite the shoes,” he says.
He puts a letter through Mrs. Sawyer’s door.
He moves on.
A streetcar goes by with nobody on it but the driver. How many dead people you could put in there and take away…the streetcar’s red though…you’d have to paint it black…
Mrs. Sawyer’s door opens. She’s got a letter in her hand. She’s waving it. She looks up and down Papineau Street. Nobody but us. She comes rushing over. She’s crying.
“Buz,” she says. “My son! He’s coming home…any day now!”
19
“Happy Birthday!”
TODAY'S MY birthday. Billy’s coming with me for ice. It’s hot again. We’re talking about what was in the letter Mrs. Sawyer got from Buz. Buz’s real name is Sydney Sawyer. In the air force he’s Flight Lieutenant Sydney Sawyer. In the letter he said he was wounded. His plane hit another plane on the aircraft carrier. But not too hard. He broke a bone in his wrist. He’s coming home on the ship the Andrea Doria.