by Gerald Lynch
She was costumed in her usual schoolmarmish garb, but with her hair pulled into a bun that gave her pointy face a more penetrating look. Unlike the other booth hosts, Alice had gathered a sizeable audience of young and old and was holding them spellbound with her presentation of “Troutstream Through the Ages.” Ancient maps were projected onto the white walls. She made the settlers of the land that would become Troutstream appear as pioneer giants. The construction of our 1960s suburb was the work of visionaries for its affordable, well-spaced family housing, child-friendly crescents and walkways, abundant playgrounds and park trails, and with the whole protected by encircling greenbelt. She’d made me reflect, see my familiar place differently. And when I thought about it, I remembered a disturbing truth: the much-maligned suburban dream of earlier decades was of an environment built for young families, for children. That dream now deserved the snobbish disdain of inner-city dwellers (the locale of nightmarish Market Slashers)?
Most enthralling had been Alice’s slide show of life along the actual river that had given Troutstream its name. With the aid of an old map and a wooden pointer with pink rubber tip, she conjured for us how once upon a time a whole different world had existed along the busy river that was now the shrunken Troutstream creek. In the late nineteenth century a steamer had docked daily at a bustling landing near where the much-diminished stream now trickled under St. Joseph’s Boulevard, ran on past the sewage treatment plant and eventually dripped into the Ottawa River. The former bucolic scene, I learned, had been called Dodgson’s Landing, after the area’s first settler, Blackburn Dodgson. To enter with Alice the vanished world of the sepia-toned slides, a community bustling with men in straw boaters and women in big hats and hooped skirts, with a side-wheeler steamship waiting to take passengers on trips along the placid Troutstream to small towns that no longer existed… Well, it was a transporting experience in every sense! Don’t tell me about the Orient Express and the Giant’s Causeway — take them away!
And children, of course; there were children everywhere in Alice’s pictures: rolling big hoop wheels with sticks and playing on teeter-totters and tree swings, boys palming frogs and conspiring behind girls, girls chasing boys as if to hit or kiss them, and many eating ice cream or big lollipops or looking like they were about to swallow wedges of tiered cake — not a healthy food choice in sight!
Unlike Debbie’s many fundraisers, Alice’s Troutstream Children’s History Fair had turned a profit. Debbie never referred to it again, or forgave Alice, I suspected from the increasing iciness in their relations. And I’d begun to hope that sylphish Alice Pepper-Pottersfield was the closest thing to an ally I had on the TCA. When push came to shove, as it was about to in the matter of paying Bob Browne the money owed him for the playground work, Frank Baumhauser would be a Debbie supporter. The only other committee members, the Lewis twins, were Debbie flunkies, certifiable, and probably my enemies now for depriving them of the clean-up contract.
“Oh, forget it,” chirped Debbie when Alice didn’t settle her mind about the plural of apparatus. “Here in the New World we have no time for the latitudes of proper grammar.”
Frank Baumhauser winced as though a big cat under the table had swiped at his scrotum.
“What was that, Frank?”
To my surprise, Frank silently met Debbie’s gaze, till Alice shot him a sideways look, which caused him to do a relenting petite mal with his eyes. I wondered if I’d been wrong about Frank too. Perhaps Alice and he and I could regularly make league against Debbie and the Lewis brothers. Then it struck me that maybe Frank and Miss Pepper-Pottersfield had a thing going on. Neither was married and the love of a good woman can embolden such a man.
The Lewis brothers always sat to left and right directly along the table from Debbie. Forty-something twins they were, Larry and Gary, the Tweedledum and Dumber of the TCA. Big beefy men with blond brush cuts, they may once have been close to identical but were now fleshy and fleshier, with differently evolved faces. Neither had married, and they lived together in Troutstream’s only mansion. The Lewis brothers never opposed anything Debbie proposed.
At the previous meeting, which was only days before, after I’d again stated that we simply had to find the money to pay Bob Browne, even unto borrowing it, Larry Lewis had looked straight across at Gary and said my name like a joke: “Lorne Thorpe.” And Gary had slapped the table lightly, as he always did at one of Larry’s poor jokes, which were always witless groaners. But this time they both smiled menacingly (they were big boys). Alice Pepper-Pottersfield had primped and squirmed on her seat as if transferring an impression of her bony bum to a soft mould. I’d taken that for another hopeful sign, glanced at Frank then back at her.
“Alice?” I’d prompted.
She’d compressed her lips, breathed audibly through her nose and said downwards, “All I know is that the children shall be most disappointed if Mr. Robert Browne does not keep his date with them, so to speak, in Shoal Park this coming weekend. His antics as he works are all they talk about on the bus.”
Debbie had rapped the table. “Oh, Alice Pepper-Pottersfield, you are such a silly ducky!” But Debbie really did look unsure of herself with Alice now, anxious rather than assertive. And consequently the sylphish Alice appeared that much more a solid presence, and indeed my potential TCA ally.
Alice had raised her face to me, and those frozen-over eyes held me. “I would like to know how the repossession people came to know that Mr. Bob Browne was working for us?”
I’d blown a puff of air. “It certainly wasn’t me, Alice, if that’s what you’re implying. I was contacted by the repo people at CHEO and I put them off the trail, just as Bob had instructed me to do. But they don’t depend on informers anyway, those repo boys and girls. I don’t know how it works in England, but here a lot of them are former cops, and they always get their man, recover the vehicle, if not any actual money.”
“Yes, quite, the actual money.” Alice hadn’t budged. “If we didn’t have the funds to contract with Mr. Browne, even informally, as I’ve only recently learned we didn’t have, then why did we ever make the arrangement in the first place? Mr. Treasurer Baumhauser?”
Frank had dropped his chin and compressed his lips, mumbled, “Like I told you, Alice, usually Larry and Gary do our work, and, well, we have, like, a working arrangement with Twin Bros. It was Dr. Thorpe’s fault. He brought Bob Browne in.”
“Me? I didn’t know how your finances work. I’d assumed we had the funds. I’m just your so-called community-health consultant, remember?”
The big Lewis boys had grinned at each other like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. Debbie had blushed deeply an uncelestial hue and quickly hammered back into place whatever group lie had suddenly floated free. Alice was relatively new to the TCA, if not as recent as I. She obviously wasn’t privy to its history of suspect financial arrangements with the Lewis boys, though it certainly looked like she was beginning to wield some influence. Frank Baumhauser had snapped to at her remarks, and, as observed, even her “superior,” Debbie, appeared more rattled by her than at earlier meetings. Perhaps it was the lingering effect of her success, both social and financial, with the children’s history fair. But when we’d contracted with Bob for his work in the parks, neither I nor Alice had known that the TCA’s money cupboard was bare because of the vast overspending on the Troutstream Community Centre, the monument to Debbie’s madness in which we were again met to weave further our tangled web.
With a crack of her gavel, Debbie brought us to order.
“The minutes of the last meeting are approved and seconded by Larry and Gary respectively, no business arising from them, our only new business is continuing. To wit, how to proceed with cleaning up the playground apparatuses-usses…at Shoal Park.”
I took a sharp breath. “But, Debbie, shouldn’t our first order of business be to determine how we’re going to find the funds to pay Bob Browne t
he money owed him for the work he’s already done?”
“Indeed,” mumbled Alice to the tabletop.
Larry again did his solemn percussive thing with my name: “Lorne Thorpe.”
Gary was arrested with table-slapping hand poised —
“Indeed it should!”
And there he stood, in the twilight of the entranceway, Bob Browne himself, all five-foot-zero of him. In regular-size green rubber boots that on him came past his knees like swashbuckler legwear, sporting one of his many colourful flaring shirts (red-and-black checks, this one), with the whole ensemble topped by his wild pumpkin-coloured hair.
Debbie’s kids immediately scampered from the far corner and came to caper about his legs (not much longer than a child’s themselves). Since we’d contracted with him only a week or so before for the removal and replacement of all wood-and-metal apparatuses and surrounding earth in Troutstream’s six playgrounds, Bob Browne had become a great favourite with the children.
He slid a few steps towards us but was unable to advance in the press of kids.
“We had a deal!” he declaimed, pointing a forefinger like a stunted parsnip at the vaulted ceiling. The kids, startled for an instant, squealed and clapped, the show had started. “A guarantee of service and a promise of payment! I was to receive thirty percent of the total hundred thousand when I’d shown that I could do the job in the first playground, Piscine Court. I showed that I could. Still I received nothing in recompense. Nothing, that is, but the smiles and laughter of children.” He was serious, he smiled and touched a few heads. “Consequently, I have had to postpone entering the second playground, Shoal Park.” The kids moaned. “So I put it to you yet again,” he swept a hand towards us, “ladies and gentlemen of the Troutstream Community Association executive, is Bob Browne to be paid tonight, as was promised, or is he to leave here left to his own devices?”
“Pay him, pay him!” the children cried. To our eternal shame, they knew the whole sordid story of promises broken.
Debbie ignored his question. “Would you care to join us, Mr. Browne? We were just about to deliberate proposals for the completion of the work you’ve apparently decided to abandon forthwith.”
“I would not care to join you, Mrs. Carswell. Nor have I abandoned any work. My part of the bargain has been kept. Now, I am going over to that corner where” — again he indicated with that root-like forefinger — “with the children to distract me, I will await payment.”
The kids fought gently for his hands and pulled him to their end of the room — “Play! Play! Play!”
“As you wish it, so shall it be,” murmured Debbie. Then mumbled aside, “But if you are not going to finish the work for which you were contracted for, well then, mayhap the police …”
Debbie frowned towards the corner, because Bob Browne was now standing amidst the seated children and playing his Jew’s harp. Just what enthralled those high-tech kids was a mystery, because the “music” was something like the soundtrack to a cartoon flea bouncing around: boing boing boing…
“Lorne?” Debbie asked distractedly. “Can we have…your report?”
“What report?”
She performed that shiver of her big Debbie head, like someone had slipped a cold eel down the crack of her ass. Her bovine Debbie eyes bugged, her wattled chin dropped, and she didn’t begin to stand so much as to stretch upwards with intent. We all turned toward the corner where she gaped.
The children were up and dancing in a growing frenzy. Bob Browne was leading them, twanging his Jew’s harp and kicking out sideways in some devil’s jig. One of the kids, Debbie’s oldest I think, was coughing, asthmatic perhaps in the excitement or reacting at the height of the ragweed season. Suddenly his hacking was a whooping threat of respiratory seizure.
Still sitting, Debbie stretched her neck: “Why, that’s my…that’s Petey!”
But instead of rising and rushing to his aid, she flopped sideways and commenced rummaging in a white leather bag the size of something a hockey goalie might throw into a bus’s undercarriage.
“Where is that blankety-blank inhaler? There — no, that’s Stacey’s insulin…Mickey’s anti-anaphylactic…Barbie’s bum-eczema cream …”
I pushed off from the table and was on my way to the corner — I stopped halfway. I touched my waist, my cellphone reassuring. Let Debbie pump her kid full of Ventolin. For the sake of my Hippocratic conscience, I’d call it in, if need be, then turn the case over to the paramedics. I had my own troubles, thank you. Suddenly, more than anything, I needed to be back home. What was I doing here?
Bob quit his playing. The children closed round as he took Petey by the upper arm. It was difficult to ascertain what happened next, but I think Bob put one hand on the small of the boy’s back and the other flat on his chest and laid him into a bean-bag chair, like dunking a convert. The boy stopped whooping, though his wheezing still pierced the mountainous hall like a puncture. Bob quietly commanded, Play! And I heard the Jew’s harp twang, but weakly. The other kids made ee-yoo sounds of disgust, some turned away, opening a space through which I could see better.
Bob was removing the Jew’s harp from the child’s mouth. He placed it in his own and twanged a few notes. Then he was handing it back to Petey, like two divers sharing an air supply. Again came the kids’ ee-yoo, because the Jew’s harp wasn’t being wiped. Even from a distance I could see the saliva drip. This time Petey tried to block his mouth. Instead of shoving the harp into him, Bob took the blocking hand and, like someone forcing money on a proud relative, closed it on the harp. Nodding encouragement, he gestured for Petey to play again. Petey did, weakly plucking the small prong sticking out to the right of his mouth. The twanging grew stronger. Petey wasn’t coughing. I looked back at the table, where they were all watching the hump of purse-rifling Debbie instead of the miraculous procedure taking place in our midst. Or all but Alice Pepper-Pottersfield, who was alternating between the corner scene and me with what I can only describe as an angelic expression on her normally dour face.
Petey took Bob Browne’s hand and stood. He handed back the harp. He was breathing easily. He placed a hand flat on his chest, and the brightest amazement I’d ever seen on one of Debbie’s kids beamed forth.
“Mom!” he called to the table. “Mom!” he shouted again, easily filling his lungs. “Call Dad! Get Dad!” He stopped trying to get his mother’s attention and, looking down at himself, was enthralled by his own deep breathing.
Debbie’s preoccupied voice idled past me: “I do seem to have misplaced your inhaler…Peter. Mayhap, just this one occasion, you can use Terrence’s, if thereby abrogating my own edict about putting any other kids’ thing in your mouth. Now where is …”
Bob Browne put an end to proceedings. He walked towards me, but instead of coming alongside, halted a couple of yards away, facing the committee. I turned sideways so as to watch both the TCA executive and Bob. He had their attention. He slid his left foot forward and made a sweeping bow like some Peter Pan doffing his cap to an unfriendly rabble of grown-ups. He straightened and merely flipped out his empty right hand, rubbing its fingers in the gimme-money gesture.
“Gotcha!” bellowed Debbie, straightening up from below the table with a flushed face and the blue inhaler of Ventolin pinched between thumb and forefinger. She saw that Pete was out of danger and, predictably unpredictable as ever, gave herself a puff. “Oh!” she piped. Then more seriously to expectant Bob: “Yes, Mr. Browne? You have changed your mind mayhap?”
He crossed his feet — he may even have hopped! — and flipped out both arms like some sort of court jester:
“What made the Big Bang bang?”
“Par…the big bang-bang?”
The children shouted in a mountain-ringing chorus: “Don’t be dumb-dumb! Ask again!”
“Why is there something instead of nothing?”
“Why I —”
/> “Don’t be dumb-dumb! Ask again!”
Bob smiled small at me: “What do the children mean?”
“Don’t be dumb-dumb! Ask again!”
I recognized the routine from Wy Knots that had upset Otto Fyshe with the boy, the koan-ish questions followed by the string of dumb-dumbs and ask-agains till Wy got what he was getting at.
Bob gazed at me and mimed loudly with his mouth: Love.
Hey, fine by me! Though I said nothing.
Unsmiling then, Bob looked to the table and lighted on his most likely sympathizer.
“What do you think of that, Mizz Pepper-Pottersfield? What do the children mean?”
“Don’t be dumb-dumb! Ask again!” chorused the kids.
Literally rising to the challenge, Alice Pepper-Pottersfield scraped back her chair and stood. She brushed away a strand of lank hair as though signing a tiny cross on her forehead. “Can we put an end to this charade?” Shar-odd. And snapped, “Debbie?”
Debbie, uncharacteristically cowed, harrumphed: “Yes, we must do as Alice says. Just what is it you want, Mr. Browne?”
Alice shivered as would a thin woman who’d stamped her foot. “Stop. As Dr. Thorpe said in a more generous frame of mind: are we or are we not going to pay Mr. Browne the money promised and now overdue?”
She looked at each of them, who in turn dropped their heads, then glanced at me, and came to rest on Bob. “What sort of example are we setting our children, Dr. Thorpe?” she asked, though she didn’t take her eyes off Bob. She sat and stared straight ahead at nothing.
Bob Browne beamed at oblivious Alice: “Thank you for that ringing endorsement, dear Alice, if you will allow the endearment. Wy himself could not have composed a more appropriate question.”