The other end of the line was tied to the top of a slim willow gad that we pushed into the river-bank clay, near the edge of the water. We also attached a small harness bell to the gad, so that when it was pulled forward and sprang back the bell would ring.
We heaved the railroad spike, trailing the line and hooks, fifty feet out into the river. Here, it quickly sank to the bottom where the goldeyes lurk. These pretty, silvery fish, with the golden eye, are peculiar to the Saskatchewan River system. Unless they are cured and smoked by a special process (Lake Winnipeg Goldeye), they tend to be soft and full of bones. But it was good fun catching them.
We just lolled around the bank, stuffing ourselves with berries, and waited for the little bells to ring. Then we’d pull in the line and take off the fish, which might be a sucker or a carp or a chub or, if we were lucky, a goldeye. Some days we’d catch a dozen or so and take them up to the residential area, and peddle them door-to-door at two for a quarter. If there is a better way for a kid to spend his time, I’d like to know about it.
We never swam in the river because the current was too strong and treacherous, and besides, at intervals along the bank were huge pipes, through which offal from the kitchen sinks, bathtubs and toilets of Nutana poured into the river.
We often went down to the river bank at night. Darkness was no problem. In our minds we had a map of every winding path, every clearing, every big tree. We’d play hide-and-seek, and cops-and-robbers, and often we’d light a fire and roast potatoes that we scrounged from somebody’s garden, crab-apples that we’d got from Mr. Bergen’s big crab-apple tree, and, if we were lucky enough to be able to afford some wieners, we’d roast them too. Sometimes we’d discover that a church group or university class would be having a wiener roast in one of the big clearings, and then we’d crawl close and listen to the stories and the singing of There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding, or The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. We’d hear the laughter and the jokes, and we’d feel like Indian scouts spying on the palefaces.
And that’s how Bill Grey and I got into trouble.
Bill was a robust Scottish kid whose father worked in the Department of Agriculture at the university. He was full of adventurous ideas, and could run like a deer. He often got teased by the other kids because he’d never steal carrots, and was always talking about things like fair play and sportsmanship. I guess he was the only kid I ever knew who had what you’d call ideals. He also believed the clean mind in the healthy body bit they taught us at Grace Church Sunday School, and he exercised faithfully. The first year I was in Saskatoon Bill was my almost constant companion.
This Friday night in October we had gone down to the river bank. We had a few potatoes and a half-dozen wieners, and we headed for a favourite clearing which was about a hundred yards from the 25th Street bridge. But, as we ran down the path towards it, we saw the flickering of a camp fire and heard voices. Somebody was there ahead of us.
“Shh,” Bill admonished in his best Indian scout style. “Let’s sneak up on them and see what’s going on.”
So we did–without making a sound. We managed to squirm right up behind a huge log at the edge of the clearing and, by peering around it, we could see the group on the other side of the fire. But this was no Sunday School or university group who’d come down there for a little innocent fun. These were two guys in their early twenties whom neither of us had ever seen before.
They each had a girl with them, and as I crept closer my heart beat faster. This, I felt, was going to be something quite different from our other spying adventures. I peered cautiously around the end of a log. I recognized both the girls. One of them, I knew, had the kind of “reputation” we had often heard the older boys talking about, although we didn’t know exactly what they meant. The other girl was an entirely different type. I knew her quite well for she lived on the street next to us. And now she wasn’t saying anything or laughing loudly like the first girl. In fact, she was quite plainly scared.
“I think it’s time I went home now, Frank,” I heard her say. “My mother will be worried.”
“Aw come on now, Ruthie,” the young man named Frank scoffed. “Relax. And drink your beer. You’ve hardly touched it.”
“I really don’t like beer very much.”
He laughed loud. “You will. It grows on you. Come on, drink up and we’ll have some fun.”
We could see that the other two were already having a lot of fun. The guy had his arm around Anna and was kissing her, and she was giggling.
“Look at Anna,” Frank urged. “She’s no spoil-sport. Come on, Baby, let’s you and I make some music.” He reached out and pulled her over to him. He was a mean one, I could see, and I wished I was anywhere else but where I was. But still it fascinated me. I squirmed ahead to get a better look around the log.
Ruth was struggling with him now as he tried to kiss her. Then he grabbed her hard and pulled her down. She started to yell, and he put his hand over her mouth and slapped her hard on the side of the face.
She began to cry then and looked at him pleadingly. “You’re not very nice,” she whimpered.
It was then that Bill did the damned fool thing. He jumped to his feet and shouted in his sternest boy-scout-type voice. “Don’t you dare strike that girl!”
I jumped to my feet too, and started away from there as fast as I could go. “Come on, Bill,” I shouted. “Cheeseit!”
But we weren’t fast enough for those two. They leaped over the fire and had us by the scruff of the neck before we could turn around. Frank had me, and the other guy, Roy, had Bill.
They began to rough us up and we kicked and pulled and yelled about what our dads would do if they didn’t leave us alone.
Both the girls left as fast as they could go.
“Hey!” Roy shouted. “Wait. What’s the idea?”
But they didn’t wait, and when the men turned their attention back to us they were in a foul mood, full of beer and frustration.
The language they used to describe us could scarcely be printed, and while they were using it they kept pushing us and pulling us around, cuffing our heads and twisting our arms behind our backs.
“Come on, you guys, let us go,” I pleaded. “We weren’t doing anything.”
“Oh no–just ruined everything, that’s what you did,” Frank growled. “It’ll be the frosty Friday before I ever get that mouse alone again. Damn your rotten little hide.” He emphasized his remark by giving my arm an extra twist.
“You chaps will get into serious trouble if you don’t release us,” Bill advised them, and got his own arm twisted for his pains. He also got a punch on the nose and, as the blood streamed down his face, we both realized that we might be in very big trouble indeed.
“What will we do with these young bastards?” Frank asked.
Roy looked down towards the river. “Well, we could throw them in. That’ll cool them off.”
“Hey, don’t do that!” I was really scared now. “It’s deep out there and the current is strong.”
The trouble with situations like this in real life is that there’s no last-minute rescue. In all stories in books, movies, and magazines, no matter how bad things get for the good guys there is always a dramatic rescue in the last reel or chapter. The bad guys are bested, and the good guys win. So, no matter how terrified or worried or excited you may be about the final outcome, at the back of your mind is the knowledge of this time factor. You know that before the ending, good must triumph over bad, right over wrong, the hero over the villain.
I kept listening for the clump of footfalls through the bush that would signal the arrival of help. None came. This was reality, not fiction. As I felt myself being shoved towards that dark and dangerous water I had, for the first time in my young life, the realization that there really was no one watching over me, sheltering me with the great wings of righteousness. I was for it.
Today, when I read of children in African or Asian villages being threatened by an enemy, eith
er in the sky above or in the jungle around, I get a horribly real feeling of what they must be experiencing. This is it. It’s actually here. No rescue. No help. People do kill little children, or hack off their hands, or tear out their tongues, for any number of brutal reasons. We see it happen on television–live, and in glorious colour.
I would like to be able to say that by some daring physical or mental feat we bested, or tricked, or outwitted our captors, but it was nothing as glamorous as that. What saved us was that we began to cry. We cried with sheer, cruel, animal terror. We were afraid of being drowned. We cringed, and whimpered, and begged for mercy. We promised that we’d never tell anybody, and that we’d never do it again–although heaven knows when we’d be likely to get the chance. And it worked. Our complete submissiveness saved us. Just as a big dog won’t destroy a cowering little dog, so Frank and Roy couldn’t destroy us. They cuffed us soundly and let us go. We were up that dark path like a shot, and long gone from that district before they could change their minds.
I’ve never felt particularly good or bad about the incident. There is a chance we may have saved Ruth from a pretty rotten time. It may be that she agreed to come to the river bank with Frank from pure ignorance of his type of guy, and the way he was likely to behave, and that she would never take such a chance again. At the time, both Bill and I were too ashamed of our cowardly attitude to talk about it to each other, let alone tell anyone else. The subject just never came up. The standards which had been instilled in us simply wouldn’t permit us to face the fact of our poltroonery.
But we quit sneaking up on people, and prying into their affairs. My brother, Hub, had a thing about pigeons. When we moved to the house on Temperance Street (Mother couldn’t stall the landlord on Baird Street any longer), he decided to go into the pigeon-raising business seriously.
“I tell you, Fat, there’s money in them,” he confided. “They multiply like flies, and once you get them to nest at your house they never go away.” He was dead right on the last point, but dead wrong on the first.
He knew where there were some pigeons, too. Unattached pigeons, you might say, that could be had for the taking, for they nested under the arches of the 25th Street bridge.
The 25th Street bridge in Saskatoon is at the end of Clarence Avenue and University Drive, and the main road down from the University. It is built of concrete, with eight piers standing in the river. In between these piers are concrete arches and, if a kid was agile and daring enough he could cross the wide river by running up and down these concrete ramps from pier to pier. There was just one catch: at each pier you had to manoeuvre your way around a narrow ledge in order to get onto the next arch. If you slipped and fell, you’d land on very hard concrete about thirty feet below. There was a dirty brown stain half-way up one of these piers that was, so it was whispered, the dried and weathered blood of a kid who had fallen at some time in the dim past. We would stand and stare up at it, motionless and silent, our young lives momentarily blighted by the realization that all is dust.
Hub, being both agile and daring, often led us across the bridge by the underneath route. It was a great trial for me, because I had acrophobia. When the other kids would climb up telephone poles and slide down the guide-wire to the ground, I just couldn’t do it. When they walked along the concrete railing of the bridge–at least two feet wide and perfectly safe–I wouldn’t dare. If I got up on anything which was over two feet above the ground, my knees turned to jelly and I had an irresistible urge to jump. I didn’t know that I had acrophobia, of course, nor did any of the gang. They and I concluded that I was chicken.
It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered I wasn’t chicken at all. I was as helpless to combat this affliction as a kid with one leg is to grow another.
This is one respect in which kids today are better off than we were. They know a lot more. Every kid today knows about psychology. You hear them talking about their feelings of insecurity, inferiority complexes, paranoia, inhibitions. They understand that when they can’t do something another kid seems able to do–there’s a reason for it. That it’s just as natural for one kid to be more daring than another as it is for one to have better eyesight, or curlier hair. Most adults still cling to such artificial distinctions between people; still feel compelled–for example–to boast of their sexual prowess. But today’s kids, when they grow up, won’t have such compulsions. They’ll be more with it, understand their hangups better, be capable of explaining their own prejudices and bigotry. They won’t be so easily conned or persuaded. The world can’t help but benefit from such enlightenment.
Anyway, Hub knew that it was under the bridge the pigeons lived and had their nests and this, he decided, would be the source of our pigeon supply.
How do you catch pigeons? They can fly and you can’t. Well, pigeons sleep at night, and it’s possible, somebody informed us, to capture them then by shining a flashlight on them. They won’t move; they’ll just sit there like a country boy at Piccadilly Circus, stunned by the bright lights, and wait to be gathered in. Nothing to it.
So we set out at night with a gunny sack and a flashlight to capture the pigeons under the 25th Street bridge. An old board leaning against the first pier served as a ramp, up which we scrambled. From there on it was a matter of running up the arches and making the hazardous traverse of the ledge. Finally we were right up under the roadway of the bridge and we could hear the pigeons restlessly moving above us. To reach them, Hub had to negotiate another ledge that took him out over the river, and fifty feet below we could see the muddy swift water of the Saskatchewan, waiting to swallow us up.
“Hey, Fat …” I heard him call in the darkness, “I got a couple. I’ll drop the sack down to you.”
The sack with two fluttering pigeons fell down on my head. I made a desperate grab to prevent the sack, or me, or both, from falling into the river. I made it, and held the sack until Hub scrambled down from his perch. We had two pigeons.
We took those pigeons home and put them in a wooden box with a wire front, and sat and looked at them. Blueish feathers they had, and pert blueish heads that turned this way and that as they stared at us with their beady eyes.
“God–pigeons!” Hub kept repeating over and over.
We fed the pigeons, and watered them, and watched over them. We gave them good pigeon-names–Pete and Patricia. We built a little house for them that we made secure up under the eaves, with a little door and a little perch outside it. When we thought they’d been with us long enough to feel at home, we transferred them from the pen to the house, with the hope that they’d take up housekeeping. They flew away and never came back.
So it was back to the 25th Street bridge for more pigeons. The next pair we got were even prettier than the first. Instead of being blueish, they were bronze, with streaks of white running through them. “I’m glad the first two didn’t stay,” Hub opined with the simple logic of expediency. “This pair is better.”
We went through the same process. Exactly the same, right up to the part where they flew away and never came back.
It was then that we realized that keeping pigeons wasn’t going to be as simple as we’d supposed. The hard part wasn’t getting them; it was keeping them. We fed them better, and kept them penned up longer. With each pair we stood and watched anxiously to see if they might condescend to stay. And each pair flew away.
How do you get a pair of pigeons to stay? Actually, it turned out to be quite easy. On one of our forays Hub discovered a pair of half-grown pigeons in a nest. Acting on impulse, we brought these home instead of adults. We gave them a soft, downy bed, fed them soft foods and acted as Mother and Father to them. Sure enough, when they were finally able to fly they didn’t even try to leave us, but built a nest up under the eaves. We had our two pigeons.
Then we learned something else about pigeons. They multiply fast, and they never leave the place where they were raised. Our pair reared two offspring, and they in turn reared two more, and it was won
derful. The soft cooing of birds on the roof, the rapid flutter of wings, the sight of them alighting in the neighbour’s garden and pecking out his seed peas–all of these joys were ours. Unfortunately, our landlord again lost patience, and again we had to move, leaving our beloved pigeons behind.
Years later, when I was far removed from Saskatoon and my boyhood and had kids of that age myself, I returned to look at the house on Temperance Street. There it was–the caragana hedge, the tiny front lawn, the glass front door through which I’d once shot a hockey puck–and the pigeons! They practically covered the place. Brown ones, black ones, white ones, bronze ones. There was also a tattered “For Sale” sign, tacked to the verandah post.
I spoke to a man who came out of the house and told him I might be interested in buying the place.
He was unimpressed. “Nobody will ever buy this place.”
“Why not?”
“Pigeons!” He went black in the face. “Those bloody pigeons! They’ve ruined the place! They’ve ruined the whole street!”
“Uh–don’t you like pigeons?”
“Sure. One pigeon–or two–or even a dozen. But not thousands! We have pigeons the way other people have mice. You can’t sleep at night for pigeons. You can’t step out on the verandah without stepping in pigeon.…”
“I wonder how they came to settle here?” I asked innocently.
“I just wish I knew. I just wish I knew. If I had the guy who first brought pigeons here I’d pigeon him all right.”
“You don’t own this house then?”
“This place? I hope to tell you I don’t. I can’t even stand it as a renter–even with houses as scarce as they are! I’d rather live in a shack. I’d rather live in a tent. Pigeons!” He stomped off down the street.
12 Masturbation is the Thief of Time
We learned about sex in the gutter, and as far as I’m concerned that’s the best place to learn it. One thing about being instructed in the pleasures and hazards of sex by our peers was that they, at least, were honest. They may have been a bit mixed up here and there on some of the more technical points, but no other kid would ever deliberately lie to me regarding such matters, which is more than I can say for the adults.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 13