Spud Sweetgrass
Page 5
“Discuss away, Spud Sweetgrass! Always glad to learn from and listen to an industrious and bright representative of our younger generation!”
“The other day I was swimming at Westboro Beach and I could smell and even taste chip grease in the water,” I say.
Mr. Fryday’s face changes.
“Do you think,” I say, “that somebody would go down there to the beach and throw worn-out grease in the river?”
Mr. Fryday’s face is all of a sudden different than his real face.
How can a person have a new face all of a sudden? Have one face for ever since you met him and then, in one or two seconds, get a brand new face? A darker face. A worried, scared, mad face. Mr. Fryday’s fingers go to his cheek. His rings sparkle as they come across his mouth.
VIII
Somerset Street is very quiet this morning. There’s nobody in the Mekong Grocery except the guy and his wife who own the place. Pacific Video isn’t open yet. The Nha Hang Vietnamese Restaurant has only a couple of customers.
Across the street, at the Wah Shing Gifts and Pots Store, the girl is sweeping the three cement steps.
Into the Sun Ming Meat and Seafood Company a guy is quietly carrying a heavy box. The Palace Dining Lounge is closed until tonight. A woman and a kid are going into the Acupuncture Clinic.
An old man sitting on the steps of the Vietnamese Pool Hall is smoking a cigarette. The guy whose pants are going to fall down any minute now is standing in the doorway.
It’s going to be hot again today.
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is playing very low. If you walk along the Ottawa River Parkway along the bicycle path there, or you walk around Pink Lake up the Gatineau Parkway, the water and the trees and the earth and the sky remind you of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.
Mr. Fryday’s own face is back again. His face of fear is gone. For a little minute there, his new face scared me. And it made me sad. It’s sad to see a happy face turn into a face of fear.
“That’s a very interesting observation,” says Mr. Fryday. “Very interesting. Very serious, too. Suggesting that somebody takes grease down to Westboro Beach and, for some reason, dumps it there.”
“Why would anybody do a thing like that?” I say. The guy across the street at the Meat and Seafood Company clatters against the door with his heavy box.
“Could we go down there to Westboro Beach?” says Mr. Fryday. “And could you show me exactly what it is...what you think is there?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Lock up the wagon,” orders Mr. Fryday, and goes into the Mekong Grocery to phone a taxi. In a few minutes along comes a taxi. As soon as we’re in the back seat Mr. Fryday is talking away with the driver. The driver is wearing a big beautiful turban. What is his country? How long has he been in Canada? What does his turban mean? Has he got any kids? Does he ever go back to India? How many times? Is it expensive? How many turbans has he got?
By the time we get to Westboro Beach Mr. Fryday knows everything about the guy. He even knows all about a big Sikh party that’s coming up. The guy’s son, who’s going to turn thirteen, will have a huge turban party. Hundreds of people will go. His son will get his first turban and become a man. He will also get his ceremonial dagger. Mr. Fryday gets invited to the party afterwards. Not the ceremony. But the party afterwards.
We get out of the cab and Mr. Fryday gives the guy a big tip. His name is Rajinderpal. Mr. Fryday is his new friend. He’s already calling him “Raj.”
“Goodbye, Raj, my friend. I’ll give you a call!”
“Goodbye, Mr. Fry,” shouts Raj, as he drives back onto the Parkway and leaves us at the Kitchissippi Lookout.
We walk past the cement change house where one of the Pham family went to the toilet in the middle of the greatest volleyball game ever. We walk carefully down the bank and step onto Westboro Beach. We are the only people here.
As we get closer to the shore the air seems to get heavy. The river is very calm this morning. It’s like blue glass right across to the Quebec shore. Except at the edge it’s not blue. It’s a yellowish brown color. Clots of foam sit along the shore. Gobs like the one Dumper Stubbs spit on my floor the other day float near the edge. Except these are the size of garbage pail lids.
A thick cake of brown curd crawls along under the surface all along the beach. On the sand are gummy clotted curdles of brown cream. The booms for the little kids are dripping in lardy fat and blubbery oil. Moldy rot and filthy slop and scum float out to the rafts. Thick, foul, rancid, rotten, maggoty cheese curls lie in circles around the buoys. Sludge and slush fester and stink and smear and stain the scabby surface. The rocks at the end of the beach are covered with poisonous sores and pus.
And the sand we’re standing on feels gummy.
We walk along the shore past the beach. Packs of sickly green moss hang along the rocks. Some of the branches of the trees touch the water. The leaves are hanging in slime. Mr. Fryday bends over and puts his finger in the Ottawa River. He pulls it out and puts it up to his nose.
He looks around for somewhere to wipe it off. He cleans it on a leaf over his head.
“There’s something terribly wrong here, Spud Sweetgrass,” says Mr. Fryday, almost whispering. We walk further along the shore beyond the beach and sit on a big piece of driftwood back from the water. There’s empty beer cans and a burnt-out fire. A big plastic bleach bottle is sitting in the bushes.
“Do you smell it?” I say to Mr. Fryday.
“I smell many things,” says Mr. Fryday. “And one of the things I smell smells a lot like rancid cooking grease. What are you thinking, Spud?”
“I don’t want to say,” I said. “Stubbs, maybe?”
“Are you thinking that my maintenance man, Stubbs, is coming down here in the middle of the night and pouring grease into the river?”
“Somebody is,” I say. I look out over the water. I don’t want to look at Mr. Fryday.
“He takes the grease to the rendering plant. A barrel a week. He picks up from ten wagons. I pay him three dollars per pick-up plus mileage. Thirty dollars a week. He pays fifteen dollars a week to the rendering company who receives it. He gets a receipt each time. He shows me the receipt. His profit is fifteen dollars a week. That’s over and above his regular salary that I pay him. Would he come down here with it instead, just to steal fifteen dollars? It wouldn’t be worth it. And anyway, I get the receipts. And don’t forget, Spud, I’m not the only person in Ottawa who cooks with grease. There are twenty-five or thirty other wagons in the city, plus every restaurant in the city deep-fries food. It could be any number of people committing this crime.”
“Somebody is...” I say, feeling a bit ashamed.
“Yes, you’re right,” says Mr. Fryday. “Somebody is. And it would take more than a barrel or two of grease to cause this. Somebody is dumping a lot more than a barrel or two of grease to cause this mess!”
We leave the river and get up onto the Parkway. We cut across the jogging path, cross the long lawns, cut through a gate in the fence and walk up to the corner of Churchill Avenue and Richmond Road. Mr. Fryday goes into the Easy Street Cafe and gets his friend Terry the Greek to phone us a taxi. Mr. Fryday has friends all over Ottawa.
In the taxi I see on the back of the driver’s seat his name: H. Ramlochand. Mr. Fryday is talking to him.
“Harvey, have you been back to Guyana this year? Is your girlfriend a Canadian yet? Is she up here in Canada yet?”
Mr. Fryday knows everybody. He could start his own E.S.L. volleyball team.
H. Ramlochand tells Mr. Fryday all about how the girl he wants to marry is coming to Canada in September and how everything’s turning out O.K.
“Goodbye, Harvey my friend,” says Mr. Fryday. While we’re getting out of the taxi and while he’s giving him a big tip, he says, “Don’t forget to invite me to your wedding!”
Back at the wagon we have another little chat while I heat up the fryers and get ready. I turn up Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, just to
get the thought and the smell and the taste and the idea of Westboro Beach out of my brain.
“Do you mind, Spud,” says Mr. Fryday, as he’s getting ready to go off on his rounds, “do you mind if I give you a little bit of a lecture, a bit of fatherly advice?” I don’t say yes or no or nod my head or anything. What’s the use? When they say that, you’re going to get the advice no matter what you say. What am I going to say, “No, I don’t want your advice, thanks very much, keep your advice to yourself?” It would only be a shock to Mr. Fryday and hurt his feelings because he likes me and thinks I’m a nice guy.
He starts right away.
“I knew your father. He was a fine man, a talented, handsome, intelligent man, and a fine trombone player. In fact I went many times to the Penguin Club on Elgin Street to hear him play when he played there with Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians’ Jazz and Swing Band. And I know you loved your father very much and that he loved you...”
I tune Mr. Fryday out for a while while I listen to Beethoven’s part where he’s by the brook, and where, by the music, you can tell that the water is beautiful and clear and sometimes shallow and sometimes deep. Then I let Mr. Fryday back in.
“...it’s understandable that you’d be angry and consider Angelo Stubbs an inferior being and assume he was guilty because he’s not a very attractive man, not a very intelligent man perhaps...” I cut out Mr. Fryday again for a minute by lowering a cold basket of chips into the hot oil which makes a cracking, roaring sound. “...but one mustn’t judge a book by its cover, and well, Spud, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean and I don’t need to say any more...you’re a good boy and you’ll go far in this world, you will.”
He sounds like he’s finished so I politely point over his shoulder behind him. There’s our first customer of the day, waiting there.
All afternoon I think about my father. Mr. Fryday is right. Maybe I am just mad because Dumper Stubbs is alive and my father’s not. It just doesn’t seem fair, though.
While the chips are selling like hot cakes I’m thinking of the times I went over to the Penguin Club on Elgin Street and sat there and drank cokes while I watched my dad playing the trombone and how the people would all cheer and say “Yes!” after he’d play a solo. And how he would hold the slide so easy, with his thumb and his finger, his wrist really loose, and how he hardly ever had to shoot the slide away out like the other trombone player in the band did. And how everybody gave standing-up applause when they played their main piece, called “Hanging Gardens.” My father wrote that one himself.
Just before supper time, when the chip business is over for the day, along comes my friend Dink the Thinker.
Dink listens while I tell him the whole thing. All about the beach and Mr. Fryday’s face, and judging a book by its cover and Dumper Stubbs being innocent and the receipts for the grease and Dumper’s fifteen-dollar extra profit on the deal. I tell Dink that I think Dumper would do anything to make fifteen extra dollars, it wouldn’t matter what it was. Didn’t I see him almost knock down everybody in Chinatown just to pick up one cent off the street?
There’s one thing, though, that Dink the Thinker and I can’t figure out. Like Mr. Fryday said, there’s lots more than one or two barrels of grease down there in the water. Where did it come from all at once?
Dink says we check out Dumper’s truck after supper. Maybe find some clues. Where is Dumper’s truck after supper? It’s where it is every night after supper Dink tells me. Parked around the Elmdale Tavern which is on Wellington Street across from the Giant Tiger and next to the Colonel Sanders. Dink sees the truck around there often when he’s cruising around on his bike. Dink’s eyes are shining like a fox’s eyes.
Good idea, Dink, you Thinker!
We go over to Dink’s place on Eccles Street and help Dink’s dad make the supper. We make roasted cheese and tomato sandwiches in their oven toaster. Dink’s dad has a line of vitamin pills in front of his open-face roasted cheese and tomato. To watch Dink’s dad eat, you’d think he was a health nut. He gobbles up about twenty different types of vitamin pills and washes them down with a glass of some kind of special health juice that looks like he just scooped it out of the river down at Westboro Beach.
There’s only one thing wrong with Dink’s dad’s health program.
He smokes.
While he’s gobbling the pills and washing them down, he’s puffing away on a cigarette. While he’s eating his roasted tomato and cheese, he’s smoking another cigarette. Now, he’s got two cigarettes going at once. One is in the ashtray, the other one is in his hand. When he sees the one in the ashtray, he gets a bit embarrassed and puts it out. He puts it out hard, smashing it against the bottom, pounding it to bits on the bottom of the ashtray, like he hates it.
“Another twenty-five cents down the tube,” he says. But in the middle of the word “tube” he starts this Olympic coughing attack. He coughs so hard that he has to grab the table with both hands. His face gets a purple color and his mouth is open like a fish you just pulled out of the water, his tongue is curled into a roll, his eyes are fogged over, his body is doubled up.
Then he gets his breath back and swallows a few times. Then his face is almost back to normal and he lets go of the table. Then he gives us some advice.
“Never smoke, boys!” he says. “Cigarettes will cost you at least twenty-five cents apiece and it’s gonna be a lot more by the time the goody-goody busybodies get through with it and anyway, it’s bad for your health!”
While he’s trying to say the word “health” another coughing fit attacks him, and Dink and I, we take our sandwiches into the other room.
Later, Dumper’s truck is there just like Dink said it would be. It’s parked around the corner from the Elmdale Tavern on Melrose in front of the famous Takahashi Martial Arts Center.
When it’s dark enough, we climb on.
The barrel in the back is full of grease. There are trash cans and rope and empty boxes and hoses. The barrel stands about half-way back. If you tipped it, it would just reach the end. The grease would pour out over the back. It would take a very strong person to tip a big barrel like this if it was full to the brim with grease. Dumper is a pretty strong guy. If the truck was parked on a slope, say backed down a beach, it would be easy. You could probably kick it over. It would be quick and easy.
The cab of the truck is filthy and smells like rancid grease. The seat is ripped and there’s take-out junk all over the floor. In a slob truck like this, there’s one surprising thing.
The glove compartment is locked.
Why does a slob like Dumper Stubbs lock his glove compartment?
Somebody’s coming. I hear Dumper’s voice. And another man’s. Dink and I slip out of the cab and squeeze the door quietly shut. We hide in the laneway in back of the Elmdale Tavern. Here comes Dumper. And who’s with him?
It’s Mr. Fryday!
Dumper gets in his truck and says something like “see ya” and Mr. Fryday strolls up Wellington Street towards Bayswater, calling out, “Goodnight! Goodnight!”
Dumper’s truck takes off in a cloud of pollution that you can see swirling around, even in the dark!
What’s Mr. Fryday doing, hanging out with Dumper?
“Doesn’t look good for nice Mr. Fryday,” says Dink.
I ride along with Dink past my street and over to Dink’s. We talk for a while outside his house. Now and then you can hear Dink’s dad in there coughing in bed.
Dink goes in and I ride on to Cambridge Street and stop under the street light in front of Connie Pan’s house. I’m feeling kind of lonesome and, I guess, I’m hoping Connie Pan will look out the window and see me there.
There’s a light on in a room upstairs and I wonder if Connie Pan’s up there reading or something.
Maybe I shouldn’t be here, specially under the light. What if Mrs. Pan looks out and sees me? Might get Connie Pan in trouble.
The street light is making a perfect shadow of me and my bike on the road.
IX
Connie Pan and Dink and me.
And Dink’s new camera. A real camera, this time.
Should be a pretty good picnic. Dink has a bag of cheese and tomato sandwiches that his dad made for us. I’m not going to eat any of them in case his dad coughed all over them while he was making them. Connie Pan has egg and mayonnaise and lettuce sandwiches. I’m going to love eating those sandwiches because she made them herself. She also has six huge almond cookies that she bought at the Yangtze Restaurant just up the street from her place. I’ve got macaroni and cheese cold meat sandwiches, some with ketchup on. Some with mustard. Some with mayonnaise. I also have six apples. I guess I eat a lot.
And Dink the Thinker has his new camera that he’s been saving for.
Mr. Fryday gave me today off to research a new sign for his wagons. I think he gave me the day off partly because of what I told him about what I suspected about his wonderful employee, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” Dumper Stubbs. I think Mr. Fryday is partly mad at me for saying stuff about his pal, his buddy, who he sits all night with in the Elmdale Tavern, and who would never do anything like pollute a river just for some extra money! Dumper “who me?” Stubbs!
I think my mouth has got me into trouble again.
First, a day off. Then a couple of days off. Then, every day off!
Maybe Mr. Fryday is starting to fire me.
Anyway, today we’re going to drive straight out Bank Street on our bikes.
Connie Pan’s mother won’t know Connie Pan is with me because there’s a big parade and festival and street sale on in Chinatown today to raise money for some poor people around there. There’ll be lots of costumes and kites and dragons and music. Her parents will be busy all day. She told them she doesn’t want to do all that stuff. She told them she wants to be Canadian, not Chinese.