by Brian Doyle
She laughed at that and then I gave her the rose. She took the rose and put it to her mouth while she sniffed it. With the red rose there she bowed and never moved her eyes off my eyes. Then she went back in and took the woman’s head out of the sink and stuck it back on her shoulders.
I walked down to the Mekong Grocery just in time to meet Mr. Fryday carefully parking the chipwagon. He was being very cheerful while he got the burners going and I helped him set out the containers and straighten up the display. And I reminded him, as usual, to switch off his parking lights.
“How was your day off for research, Spud Sweetgrass?” he said very cheerfully. It was so cheerful that it wasn’t cheerful at all. He sounded like he was worried about something.
“Research?” I said. I was thinking about the night Dink and I saw him come out of the Elmdale Tavern with Dumper.
“Research on the sign question,” said Mr. Fryday, sounding very cheerful.
“Well, Mr. Fryday,” I said, “I had a very interesting day of research yesterday...”
I put on Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Second Movement. It’s the kind of music that makes you wonder what’s going to happen next. It’s also sad kind of music. Not sad that makes you cry but sad because you don’t know what’s going to come next. It’s like a funeral of somebody you don’t know.
Should I tell him or not?
Like the Second Movement, I didn’t know what I was going to say till I said it.
“I looked at many ‘open’ and ‘closed’ signs and priced many of the different types, Mr. Fryday, and I came to the conclusion that you don’t need any signs saying ‘OPEN’ or ‘CLOSED’ at all. When a chipwagon is not there, it is closed. When a chipwagon is there, it’s open.”
This was one of the longest lies I’ve told all week.
I think Mr. Fryday thought I was being a smart-ass. He scowled at me.
A little while later he left and I got the chips ready for the day.
I played the same Beethoven movement over and over again. In the music, sometimes you know what’s going to happen and then all of a sudden you don’t. That’s why it is very quiet and deep and sad. Something way down deep is rumbling there. Beethoven must have been sad and excited at the same time when he made this music. Dink the Thinker told me Beethoven was deaf. How could you be deaf and make this kind of music?
Just before Mr. Fryday came back for the wagon, along came Connie Pan with a present for me. It was a tiny yellow buttercup, made of silk. She pinned it on my shirt over my heart. I asked her if it was a Vietnamese kind of present to give. She said no. I asked her if it was a Chinese kind of present to give. No, it wasn’t. She asked me if the rose I gave her was an Irish kind of present. I didn’t know. Was it an Abo kind? I didn’t know.
Dink came along and showed us a picture of me getting into a big truck. Then he took our picture. I had my silk buttercup on.
Connie Pan’s flower was at home in a long thin vase. When Connie Pan told her mother who gave it to her, her mother scowled at her. Just like Mr. Fryday scowled at me.
The picture shows Connie Pan in the chipwagon and me standing on the sidewalk. Connie Pan is leaning over my shoulder. I am looking at the camera, pointing at the yellow silk buttercup over my heart.
After dark, I went to the Elmdale Tavern and checked out Dumper’s truck.
His barrel was full. But not full of grease from Mr. Fryday’s fleet of wagons. It’s grease from restaurants Dumper’s been collecting. How many barrels a week does he collect? How many kitchen sinkfuls of grease does Dumper collect? And now I’m following, on my bike, Dumper’s ugly truck west along the Queensway. It’s around midnight and the truck is weaving in and out of the center lane. I’m sticking to the right lane. I’m hoping Dumper takes an exit soon because the traffic can’t see me very well and I feel like I’m going to get killed any minute. I’m as scared as I was that night by my fire when I was nine.
He doesn’t take the Island Park exit. He doesn’t take the Carling exit. He’s pulling away. I’ll only make it for one more. If he doesn’t take the Maitland exit I’ll be too far back. I still see his tail lights. I can tell his tails from the others because the truck’s got a broken spring and one side is lower than the other. Also, one light has part of the reflector broken off so it’s half red and half white. It looks like I’ve lost him. He’s not signaling. But wait, he’s starting to move across two lanes. He’s not signaling. I can hear car horns. He’s taking the Maitland exit! What a driver! More car horns. He swings right and up the Maitland ramp.
I pump my legs as fast as I can. He has a stop light at the top of the ramp. I’m going top speed as I swing up the ramp. There’s three vehicles waiting at the light. Dumper is first. I’m right up behind the third car. The light turns green. Dumper’s truck doesn’t move. More car horns. Now Dumper moves. He must be half drunk.
Now he swings right and there’s more horns because he could have gone a long time ago on the red.
What a driver!
Dumper’s not the kind of guy that gets bothered by a horn blowing behind him. I imagine him sitting there while the horns are blowing, his stupid head staring straight ahead.
When somebody blew a horn behind my father, he’d look up into the rear-view mirror and squint his eyes a bit to get a good look at the horn-blower. Then he’d name the note the blower blew.
“F Sharp,” he’d maybe say. “But you’re flat!”
Dumper crosses the bridge over the Queensway and stops at the next light. All of a sudden, I’m right behind him. I’ve got nowhere to hide except right under his barrel. He can’t see me in either of his side mirrors. I imagine him starting his truck with a jerk and dumping all those kitchen sinkfuls of rancid grease on top of me.
Dumper turns left on Woodward Avenue and then turns into a lot in behind a furniture factory. Around the front of the factory office there’s a lawn and a hedge. I throw my bike under the hedge and dive in after it. I crawl along the hedge until I can see Dumper’s truck. He’s backing it into a parking spot back there.
Dumper sits in his truck for a while. Probably having another booze snooze. Now the door opens and Dumper gets out. He’s not too steady on his feet and he’s talking to himself. He’s trying to get his key into his glove compartment lock. He can’t get it in the hole. He waves his hand. Never mind. Now he goes around to the back of the truck and climbs on. It takes him three tries to get on. The first two times he loses his balance and does a little dance around the empty lot for a while. He’s up in the truck and even though I crawl out of the hedge a bit, I can’t see what he’s doing. I can hear a wrench clanking on the barrel. He’s turning something. I can hear him gasping and sighing and clearing his throat.
Now he gets down off the truck with something in his hand. Now I can’t see him at all.
Next, he comes around the other side of his truck and leans on the door. He turns around and leans in the open window. He takes out a can of beer. He pulls the top. It makes a cracking sound that sounds pretty loud. Shows how quiet it is around here this time of night. In the distance, the Queensway is humming.
Dumper gurgles down half his can of beer and does a big sigh. Then a big long burp that sounds like somebody being strangled.
He sits on the running board and rests his head back on the door. His beer can slowly tilts in his hand. He’s dozing off. His head slides sideways across the door a bit and his mouth sags open.
He snores one big snore, like a pig grunting, and the sound wakes him up.
Dumper finishes his beer and clatters the empty can across the paved lot. Then, under his gut, he opens his pants and takes a piss. I can’t see but I can hear. This is the longest piss I’ve ever heard. It goes on and on. It’s like somebody left an outside tap on. There. It’s over. No, wait, here it comes again. I count to twenty. It stops. Oh, oh! Here comes some more. I can see the reflection of the street light on Woodward Avenue in this lake that Dumper is standing in! Here it comes again! I’m afrai
d it’s going to flow across the lawn and wash me and my bike right out from under the hedge! There can’t be any more! There; silence. Whoops, a bit more. One more short one. Now a big sigh. One more little slurp. Done. Dumper must be up to his ankles in his own piss.
Now he sloshes around to the back of the truck and gets back up in it. I can hear the wrench again against the barrel. But this time the sound is hollow.
Now Dumper gets down from the back of the truck without breaking his neck and walks around and locks the driver’s side. Then he staggers out of the lot, right past where I’m lying in the hedge, across the street and down a bit and into the front door of a small apartment building.
Dumper bangs the door open against the wall and disappears inside. I wait for a while to see if a light goes on but it doesn’t. Dumper probably lives around the back.
I go over to his truck and check it out. I climb up and tap his barrel with my knuckle. The sound is hollow.
Dumper Stubbs’s rancid-grease barrel is empty.
His barrel is the type with a plug in the bottom you can open with a wrench. But there’s no grease on the ground. What did he do with it? I pick up a long hose in the truck. It’s a type with a screw-on fixture. I lift the hose. It drips grease. I jump down from the truck and check the area again.
I look under the truck. It’s too dark to see anything. I crawl carefully under the truck, feeling the pavement with my hands flat. My hands are slapping and splashing in a warm liquid. It’s not grease. It smells like... It is! It’s part of Dumper’s lake!
Now I hear a dripping, hollow sound. The echoing sound of Dumper’s lake dripping down a well.
Now my hands are on a grate. A thick iron grate with rectangles for holes.
It’s a sewer cover.
So that’s it.
Dumper runs the grease down a hose from his barrel into a sewer under his truck!
XI
While I’m making my mother a coffee for breakfast I’m thinking.
I’m thinking how Dumper’s barrel was full that night Dink and I waited outside the Elmdale and saw him come out with Mr. Fryday. And I’m thinking about how, on the days he’d come around for the trash, I’d hear that dull heavy clunking sound when he’d hit the trash can against the side of the barrel.
A dull, heavy clunking sound, not a hollow sound, means a barrel is full.
And I’m thinking about what the red-headed friend of Rainy Day Delaney said about seeing Dumper collecting grease from restaurants. What if, every day, Dumper collected a full barrel and got paid for collecting a full barrel from the restaurants? And what if he did that every day, six days a week? And another full barrel from Mr. Fryday’s wagons on Sundays?
And what if he then, with his wrench and his hose every night...?
And the $15 a barrel he’s supposed to pay to the rendering company at the grease depot. Seven barrels times $15 is...$105 a week he can steal by just attaching a hose and...
Would Dumper break the law, pollute the world, for money?
Suddenly I’m thinking about Dumper Stubbs ruining everybody’s beautiful stroll on Sunday in Chinatown just to pick up one cent off the sidewalk.
Sure he would!
While I’m giving my mother her coffee she’s combing her short shiny black hair in the mirror. Her eyes move from her own face in the mirror to me. She looks mad.
She tells me that some official phoned from Ottawa Tech and said that if she came over and signed some papers, I could get back into school in the fall. They said this was what always was done when people got kicked out. At Ottawa Tech they’re always phoning your place for something. Mostly to try and get you to keep going to school. They must be short of students or something. Maybe it would be better if they had no students at all — then they’d have to fire hot-shot Boyle.
While I’m trying to tell her what happened, about putting my foot on the wall when Boyle came along and how Connie Pan was there, she keeps saying that everything’s falling apart because my father’s dead and then we start having a big fight.
She’s yelling how my father got laid off at the paper mill for mouthing off and how I’m doing the same now and mouthing off and now I get mean and I say why is she hanging around across the street at the Village Inn so much and I’m not the only one falling apart. And then I tell her I’m going to get hot-shot Boyle for this, it’s all his fault. Maybe I’ll get a big sign that says Boyle has lunch with naked ladies at Valentino’s all the time! and carry it up and down Albert Street in front of Ottawa Tech!
All this in the mirror!
But now she looks away from the mirror and looks at me straight on.
And now I’ve never seen my mother’s beautiful face so sad.
“Oh my God, John!” she cries. “Oh John, I’m so, so sorry,” she cries. Now she’s looking past me. For a minute I think she’s speaking to my father! I look over my shoulder to see if he’s standing there.
“Why are you so sorry?” I say. “What are you sorry about?”
“It was so selfish of me,” she cries. “I never thought of it until now. It never entered my head until just this instant,” she cries, her face sort of falling apart, tears spilling out of her eyes.
She puts her strong thin arms around me and squeezes me.
“What do you mean?” I say. “What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t see it till now,” she says in my ear, her wet cheek on my cheek, “that you miss him just as much as I do. That you loved him just as much as I did. That you lost him, too!”
She pushes me away from her so she can hold me with her eyes.
“I was behaving,” she says, “I’ve been acting as though I’m the only mourner around here, the only one who lost everything.”
She squeezes my shoulders.
“My God, John! I forgot all about you all this time!”
Now she’s got me crying.
“It must have been so lonesome for you, these past months. I’m so, so sorry,” she says softly.
Now I’m telling her everything, just like I used to. All about hot-shot Boyle and being kicked out of school and about Dumper Stubbs and the poisoned beach and about Connie Pan and E.S.L. volleyball...
“I’ll have a little chat with hot-shot Boyle for starters,” my mother says, and when she says that, I can feel muscles in her voice.
“That Connie Pan, she sounds nice,” she says, “why don’t you bring her over some time? I think I might know her mother. She comes into the Resource Center. She’s a community leader. If you’re not Chinese she’ll call you Bignose!”
“That’s her!” I say. “That’s the one!”
“Don’t be too sure,” she says. “A lot of the new Chinese Canadians say that. They don’t mean any harm, they’re just scared. You think what it would be like to live in China, not speaking the language hardly at all, surrounded by people with little noses and different shaped eyes. It wouldn’t be easy. Connie doesn’t say that though, eh?”
“No, she just laughs at it.”
“At what, your nose?” my mother says, doing one of her old jokes.
Then, as she drinks a drink of her coffee, and looks over her cup at me, I see the green flecks flashing in her brown eyes.
I give Dink a call and tell him to meet me at the chipwagon as soon as he can.
At work, Mr. Fryday doesn’t even mention my research on the “open” and “closed” business. He’s being his cheerful old self, praising me up for being a good businessman and selling those chips like hot cakes and putting on just the right Beethoven music to get the customers in the right mood. He hangs around polishing his rings and talking to some people passing by until he can give the old taste test to the first potato chip. Surprise! He doesn’t even tell me that I should have left it in a few more seconds or that I should have taken it out a couple of seconds earlier.
“Just right, Spud Sweetgrass!” says Mr. Fryday.
Under his arm he’s got today’s Ottawa Citizen. He’s reading a sto
ry in the local section while he’s tasting his perfect Beethoven’s chip. He’s singing softly his “My day is Fryday” song and flashing his rings and gold tooth in the sun’s rays. Then he leaves the paper open on the counter, open at the story he’s been reading in the local section, so I’ll read it.
“Beach Re-opens” the headline says. Then it tells all about how the mighty Ottawa River has washed away all the pollution from Westboro Beach and the water’s been tested and the authorities at Regional Environment have given the beach the O.K. for swimming again. Then it gives stuff about how many times the beach was closed last year and how many swimmers used the beach this year and all that.
No wonder Mr. Fryday’s in such a good mood. No more grease being dumped on the beach, eh Mr. Fryday! No more pollution? Your buddy Stubbs is off the hook. It’s all over. Let’s pretend it never happened. You can relax now. Back to business as usual.
Sure.
While I’m waiting for Dink to get here and working out my plan along comes Connie Pan and, oh, oh, she’s with her mother. They’re not walking like they’re going to walk by, either. They’re walking like they’re walking to see me!
I have to watch my mouth.
I’m smiling to myself, thinking of how my mother knows Connie’s mother.
Up they come. Connie Pan looks at me and shrugs her shoulders. I’m wearing my silk buttercup. She looks at it and smiles.
Mrs. Pan starts right in. Connie Pan rolls her eyes.
“Why give rose to my daughter?” says Mrs. Pan.
I can see she’s looking at my nose. She’s so far down there on the sidewalk and I’m so far up here, my nose must be hanging down like an elephant’s trunk. I make up a quick order of fries.