by Brian Doyle
D.K.
I’m sorry. Perhaps we can talk again sometime?
E.S.E.S.
Whatever.
D.K.
Thanks for your cooperation. So far. Take this card. My number is on it.
E.S.E.S. (To himself.)
She knows I’m lying. Where’d she get eyes like that, anyway?
The sound of the crack of a rifle scares me so much I jump right out of my seat.
“What’s wrong?” says my friend Dink the Thinker, and I realize I’m at his house watching TV and that the crack of the rifle is really Dink’s dad starting one of his Olympic-caliber coughs.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
“You seem so jumpy,” says Dink. “And lost. You’ve been going around all day like somebody’s put a spell on you!”
The rest of what Dink says I can’t hear because his dad’s working very hard at trying to cough up one of his lungs.
Meanwhile, wait, Spud Sweetgrass, and keep your mouth shut tight! Maybe all this will just go away.
V
Before I go home, Dink and I have a little chat about our latest project. Dink wants to win the Nobel Prize for science in the year 2025. Dink always thinks ahead. One of the ways he’s getting himself ready is he’s teaching himself how to write scientifically. The English teachers at Ottawa Tech don’t know how to teach people to write scientifically. They only know how to teach people to write about what they did on their summer holidays. So, Dink is teaching himself and I’m helping him.
Dink says the hardest thing to write is to explain how to do an ordinary little job. Like tying your shoe, for instance. Dink likes to try to write down exactly what you should do if you were from another planet and you wanted to know, step by step, how humans tie their shoes.
This week, Dink is working on how to use a can opener. Explain how to work a can opener.
My part of the project is to read what Dink writes, try out exactly what it says, and see if it works.
In Dink’s kitchen I try it out on a can of enriched vegetable juice, extra nutrition added, for health nuts only! There’s a picture of a really healthy guy on the label. We’re opening the can for Dink’s dad, the chainsmoking health nut. If they had Dink’s dad’s picture on this can of juice, nobody would buy it, and not only that, the health department would probably close down the company!
“Grasp opener with left hand and open handles sufficiently to place cutting wheel over rim of can.” What if you’re left-handed? Never mind. “Close handles firmly and turn crank clockwise to pierce lid. Continue turning until lid is almost cut out, at which time, lid will tilt up slightly.”
Everything’s working great.
Dink’s dad comes in and takes a coughing fit into the enriched vegetable juice.
I was going to have a glass of this stuff but not now.
“At this point, stop turning and remove opener from can by opening handles. Bend back lid of can and remove contents.”
Works perfect.
Good scientific writer, this Dink. This future Nobel Prize winner.
Another project we have is to get Dink’s dad off the weed. This project is not working very well. Dink wants to get him addicted to something else, some hobby or something, so he can get his mind off cigarettes. Or doctors. Maybe doctors could help.
Dink says that he thinks acupuncture might be worth a try. Or, he’s heard that people can get hypnotized off cigarettes. Maybe being in a hypnotized trance would be a whole lot better than being addicted to cigarettes.
We decide to discuss it later and I head for home.
Down Eccles Street through the cold. It’s minus 33, a record, and the wind is whipping around making the temperature with the wind-chill factor minus 47.
Across Booth Street, past the IGA where my mom and I shop, and down Anderson. There’s snow in the air but it’s not snowing. It’s so cold the streetlights look like they’re going to give up.
The laneway man is in his laneway chasing the blowing snow. The poor laneway man. I wonder how he got so crazy.
One time Dink and I tried to talk to the laneway man. Dink told him it isn’t true that every single snowflake is different, the way we always learned in school. There are snowflakes exactly the same, Dink told him, but you need a computer to find them. He also told the laneway man that the average snowflake fall in Canada is 21 trillion trillion or something. Anyway, it’s the number 21 followed by 21 zeros. That’s how many snowflakes come down on Canada in a year. That Dink! The stuff he knows!
The laneway man never even looked up. You’d think he would, just this once, since snowflakes are probably his favorite subject.
I walk past the yellow police ribbon around the parking lot where the frozen blood lies under the snow.
I duck through the brown doors that are the gate to my yard. Doors that have been there since horses were used in Ottawa, more than fifty years ago.
Doors I stood there leaning on when a man in a tinted window looked right at me.
But did he see me?
My mom is home late from work.
She’s been working overtime at her job at the multicultural center on Somerset Street. She’s been working hard to help a family of new Canadians.
The family’s doing OK, except for the grandfather. The problem is they can’t get him to come out from under his bed. He crawled in under there last summer in the middle of a big thunderstorm. I remember that storm. It was last July. I was in my chipwagon on Somerset Street, parked in front of the Mekong Grocery.
It was a great storm!
It fit right in with the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which I had cranked up full blast on my wagon stereo.
The old man has been under his bed, off and on, for six months. He’s afraid of being struck by lightning.
See, back in his country, every year, more than two hundred people get fried by lightning. It’s the worst place in the world for that kind of thing. My mom looked the whole thing up in the library.
When she told the old man’s daughter to tell him that, in Canada, not even a dozen people a year die because of lightning, the old man got it wrong when it was translated. He thought my mom said that twelve people were electrocuted right on Somerset Street every day because of lightning.
My mom felt bad because she made things worse when she was only trying to help. The old man was halfway out from under the bed but crawled right back when he got the wrong translation.
The daughter says the old man is so confused that he now thinks that it’s my mom who is causing the lightning.
I’m wishing my father was here to listen to my mom tell this.
He would laugh. My mom, the cause of lightning! That’s a good one. “She’s caused sparks to fly,” he might say, “but never lightning, not since I’ve known her, anyway!”
I like it when my mom tells me stuff that’s happening to her.
It makes me want to tell her about things that I’m doing.
But I can’t. I’m not telling anybody about who saw or who didn’t see.
I’m going to just let it go away.
My mom is looking at me.
She knows something’s going on.
My mom has brown eyes with green flecks floating.
When the green flecks start flashing, I can tell that she knows that there’s something going on.
Sorry, Mom. Can’t tell you. I’ve decided.
That’s it. That’s all!
VI
Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre is telling us stuff in French about speaking French. We’re talking about speaking of love and romance to your girlfriend or your boyfriend. At least, that’s what I think we’re talking about. But you never know. My French isn’t very good. We might be talking about what Tarte au Sucre had for breakfast this morning.
Now we’re going to have our conversation game. We work in pairs. Our topic is supposed to be romance. If we had any girls in the class it would be a bit easier. Since there are no g
irls, Tarte au Sucre sets it up so that one guy plays the girl for five minutes and then we switch.
Tarte au Sucre rings this little bell she has to tell us when the five minutes is up.
We’re supposed to be on a date, having a fancy dinner with candles and music. We’re supposed to be saying romantic things to each other because we’re madly in love.
It’s one of the dumbest things Tarte au Sucre gets us to do.
And the little bell she rings drives everybody wild.
A couple of guys on the other side of the room don’t want to be girls, even for five minutes, and a fight almost breaks out before a guy they call Fabio gets things settled down. Fabio is a monster who’s been on steroids since about grade six. Fabio says that the two guys who don’t want to be girls even for five minutes are now going to be girls for as long as he says they’re going to be girls and that’s it, that’s all! And if they don’t like that, then Fabio will stuff them inside their own desks!
I wind up partners with a guy named Roddy. Roddy’s idea of something really hilarious is making imitation dicks out of anything he can find and passing them around the room. This is his one and only joke. Making dicks out of anything he can find.
Even Fabio doesn’t think this is funny after about the tenth time. And Fabio’s idea of funny is to take something out of his nose and go around and show it to everybody.
Right now, I’m playing the girl and Roddy’s got a lot of paper rolled up, and he’s got a big eraser from graphic arts taped to the end of the roll. Our whole romantic conversation in French for five minutes is him waving this thing at me. I keep looking out the open classroom door. I’m hoping Connie Pan doesn’t walk by in the hall and see us.
When Tarte au Sucre’s little bell goes off and it’s time to switch, Roddy passes the rolled-up paper with the eraser taped to the end of it over to me.
Everybody’s doing Tarte au Sucre’s bell. The classroom sounds like a bell factory. Guys are doing little tinkly bells, other guys are doing big bong-bong bells. It’s like all the bells on Parliament Hill all of a sudden blew a circuit and they all went berserk.
A guy they call Robin, because he’s always imitating Robin Williams, runs around the room covering his ears and dragging his leg, as though the bells are driving him crazy. He’s pretending he’s a hunchback. “The bells! The bells!” he’s yelling.
Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre is following him around the room, saying stuff in French to him. Probably trying to get him back in his seat.
I take Roddy’s imitation dick and crumple it all up into a ball and walk up to the front of the room and dump it into the wastebasket.
When I get back to my desk I can tell that Roddy, the world’s greatest comedian, isn’t in a very good mood. He’s giving me one of those phony you’re-a-dead-man looks that he’s got from watching serial-killer videos.
His face is in a twist. He hasn’t quite got the look perfected yet. It might be just gas. I look back.
I’ve got a new look now that works pretty good. I use it on Roddy.
My look says, “I come from a part of town where they shoot people, dead, right under my bedroom window, pal!”
Dink the Thinker once told me that millions of years ago, when humans started walking upright instead of on all fours like animals, we got cooler because the sun’s rays didn’t strike such a large surface area of our bodies. Therefore we didn’t need thick pelts of fur to shield us from the sun and we became naked. Because we needed less water, we developed this super cooling system, very efficient, and then our brains were able to grow larger than any other animal’s.
Like a computer, the better cooling system you have, the bigger computer you can build, the bigger brain you can have.
I often wonder, when I look at Roddy, what went wrong.
Somewhere between walking naked on his hind legs and developing a brain, he missed out.
I keep watching the hallway and sure enough, Connie Pan walks by.
The difference between Connie Pan and Roddy is the same as the difference between a butterfly and a cockroach, a goddess and a worm.
I leave Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre’s class and catch up with Connie Pan in the hall. That’s the kind of a teacher Tarte au Sucre is. She doesn’t know if you’re there or if you’re not there.
Connie Pan is an A student. Her main course is graphic arts. She’s a terrific printer and drawer.
Last year, during a volleyball game she organized on Westboro Beach, she printed each player’s name and country by hand on pieces of cloth and tied the cloth like an apron around each player’s waist.
Everybody thought the printing was done by a professional. Even long names of new Canadians like Somasundaram Selvakumaram of Sri Lanka looked professional when done by the delicate but strong hands of Connie Pan.
Connie also takes welding.
She wants to be a famous sculptor.
She’ll draw her art first on the drafting board. Then she’ll sculpt it by welding pieces of metal together.
She’s already won a prize in her class for a sculpture she did. She made a running man out of a coathanger and welded him onto a bicycle wheel rim. Then she welded a loonie onto the wheel.
When you spin the wheel, it looks like the man is chasing the loonie. But he never catches it.
She printed the word “Unemployment” under her sculpture.
She’s also a student volunteer for the E.S.L. department. E.S.L. stands for English as a Second Language. She helps the E.S.L. teachers organize stuff for the new Canadians to do, so they can feel better about being in a strange land.
Some of them have never seen snow before, never felt the freezing cold.
“Imagine in your brain,” says Connie, “how afraid they might be, when it is a record temperature of minus so many degrees!”
This week she has a different project, though. She’s trying to teach a guy to read. But the guy is not an E.S.L. guy. This guy is not a new Canadian. He’s not from some foreign country. He’s from Ottawa. From Westboro!
The English teachers at Tech can’t teach him to read because they only teach English to people who can already read.
And the E.S.L. teachers can’t teach him to read because he’s not from a foreign country. They only teach foreigners, new Canadians, how to read.
So, let Connie Pan give it a try...
This kid’s problem is he can only read a word if the picture of the word is there beside it.
For instance, if there’s a picture of a chicken, and then the word “chicken,” he can read the word. But if you give him the word “chickadee” without a picture of a chickadee, he thinks the word is “chicken.”
Big problem.
Connie Pan figures that he’s got to be taught how to sound out letters, not pick out pictures, if he’s ever going to get anywhere.
We’re sitting in the cafeteria and I’m having fun watching Connie trying to help this poor guy. Jimmy Smith’s his name.
She’s sounding out different letters and combinations.
She’s getting him to sound out the letters CH. “Ch! Ch!” says Connie.
Dink the Thinker has a book of anatomy at his place. I was looking through it the other day. Looking at the names of different parts of the body. I was looking for one special part.
I’m looking at that body part right now. I’m looking at Connie Pan’s philtrum.
I’m watching her philtrum, the way it moves when she pronounces the sounds for poor Jimmy Smith. Getting him to read out the letters CH.
Connie Pan has the most beautiful philtrum on the planet Earth.
The philtrum is that groove in the center of your upper lip, just under your nose.
I want to kiss her there.
And I want to tell her the terrible secret I have.
But I can’t.
One thing I’m glad of, though.
I didn’t tell Detective Kennedy anything.
I didn’t tell her that I saw the man, and more than once. Tha
t I saw him where Connie Pan works, at the Hong Kong Beauty Salon. And I didn’t tell Detective Kennedy that Connie Pan would even be a better witness than I am.
I didn’t tell her that Connie Pan has been close enough to the guy who drove the killer van to have her beautiful hands on his awful head.
That she probably even knows his name!
I’ll protect you, Connie!
I watch Connie’s philtrum and feel fear and loneliness.
VII
It’s so cold that nobody looks at anybody as they walk down Somerset Street. People look straight ahead. And people don’t move their bodies much when they walk. They walk kind of stiff in the legs and arms. Some people are so far inside their clothes that you can’t see them at all. All you see is clothes walking down Somerset Street.
Dink the Thinker and Connie Pan and me, we’re going down to the acupuncture clinic to get Dink’s dad an appointment. He’s going to get acupunctured to see if that will help him quit smoking.
“We could set a record today!” says Dink through his scarf. The three of us, we’re completely covered except for our eyes. Dink and I look like bandits. Connie is also completely covered except for her eyes. She doesn’t look like a bandit, though. She looks more like a mysterious, beautiful Muslim woman, thinking about things, you never know what, behind her veil.
“We’re going for the coldest capital city in the world,” says Dink. “The coldest capital, up to now, is Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. They figure it out by averaging the daily low temperatures for the month of January. Ulan Bator’s record is minus 21 degrees for the month of January. That record was set years ago. We’re going for it this year. Today is a record cold for this day in Ottawa. It’s minus 33 degrees. With the wind chill it’s minus 46 degrees. But they don’t count wind chill. If we moved the Parliament Buildings to a place called High Level, Alberta, we’d set a record they’d never match. Minus 46.1 degrees!”
“I don’t want to go there,” says Connie. Connie always gets an A in Canadian geography. She knows where High Level, Alberta, is on the map. Connie loves some of the names of Canadian towns and cities. She thinks they are hilarious. She collects them in a list. She plans on doing a sculpture of some of them one day. Like Eyebrow, Saskatchewan, and Big Hole, New Brunswick.