The Blue Helmet (2 page)

“Thanks to him my nose is probably broken,” I said.

My father ground a fist into his palm. “I’ve just about reached the end of my rope. I’m scared that if you go on like this you’ll end up in jail. So I’ve made a decision.”

He paused, as if psyching himself up, and took a deep breath, locking eyes with me. “You’re going to New Toronto to live with your Aunt Reena,” he said. “I called her last night after I heard from Marchi. You—”

“I’m not go—”

My father shot out of his chair, pale with rage. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Just shut the hell up! I’ve had enough!” He hung his head, breathing deeply, sat back down. When he had regained control he said, “Lee, you’re going and that’s all there is to it. Marchi will explain things on the way.”

Marchi stood, walked to the door, and picked up the suitcase. “Do I need to cuff you?”

I looked at my father. He returned my stare, his eyes flinty with determination.

“No,” I said to the cop. “I got nowhere to run.”

Carpino took the on-ramp and merged into the traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way. As we headed east the rain let up and the swarm of cars, trucks and buses bunched tighter. Carpino fumbled his pack of cigarettes from inside his pocket. “You feel like listening now?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“See?” he said, lighting up, “that kind of smart-ass talk indicates that the answer to my question is no. Trouble is, I gotta explain some things to you before I drop you off. But first you gotta open your ears.”

I stared at the floor. Between my feet, an empty paper cup rolled back and forth.

“So, talk.”

“Your father wants you to live with your aunt for a while—”

“Yeah, well, soon as you drop me off, I’m out of there—”

“—and I figured I should explain things real clear so you don’t do what you just said you were going to do. You want a cigarette?”

“Don’t smoke.”

“One for the plus side. Anyway, here’s the thing. You’ve been suspended from school twice,
for fighting. The Board of Ed told your dad that next time you’re expelled for good—”

“I don’t give a—”

“—and I’m pretty sure you’re behind a couple of assaults that happened near your school. It’s only a matter of time before we can hang them on you. When that happens, you’re not a naughty boy fighting in the schoolyard any more. You’ll go into custody. Believe me, you don’t want that.”

I kept my mouth shut. There were three assaults, not two, if you counted the grade nine kid I grabbed and shook without working him over like I was supposed to do. He was so terrified I thought he was going to piss himself. Vernor hadn’t been too happy when he found out I let the kid go with a warning.

As we passed the junction with highway 427, Carpino eased the car into the collector lanes. By now the traffic was moving slowly—people heading downtown to work. Carpino took the turnoff for 18th Street and pulled up at a traffic light.

He lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old one and took up his lecture. “Besides the assaults, we got you for break and enter. Throw in resisting arrest and we’ll have you eating institution food until well past your best-before date.”

“Bullshit. I’ll get off,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. I didn’t know much about the legal system. “I got no record. I’m a young offender.”

“That one’s easy. Lee. We nail you for one of the assaults. You go to court, get let off by some kindly but stupid judge like you said, but then you’ll have a record. We pick you up for the other assaults and the burglary. Then you go inside.”

He braked and steered into a parking lot behind a small hotel and turned off the motor. “Now, I hope you’re clear on your situation, Lee. If I have to arrest you, I’ll throw the book at you, like they say in the
TV
cop shows. If you stay here with your aunt,” he nodded toward a door in the building across the street, “I let you alone. There’s nobody to go back to anyway, except your dad, and he’s not happy with you right now.”

“I don’t need him,” I spat. “I got my friends.”

“Who? The Tarantulas?”

“Yeah, the Tarantulas. At least they got some loyalty.”

He ran the window down a few inches and tossed the butt out. “Haven’t you figured out why we were waiting for you when you jumped off the fire escape? We’d been investigating a series of burglaries in the area—offices, warehouses, all small
concerns without much security. We got a call, tipping us off that the auto parts store was going to be hit.”

Carpino rolled the window back up and turned toward me, his eyes hard. “Think about this,” he said. “Who knew you were going to break into that place?”

I didn’t remember my aunt very well. She wasn’t around when I was a kid. But I had stayed with her once before, when my mother was dying.

Mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was seven. She was an art lover and a painter whose unframed landscapes were tacked up all over our apartment. My father wanted to take her to Italy before she died—although he never put it in those words—because she had always dreamed of visiting Rome and Venice and Florence to feast on paintings and sculptures. I remember the discussions and arguments Mom and Dad had—about the expense, about maybe taking me with them—before they finally packed me up and drove me to my aunt’s, promising they’d come home soon and bring me lots of presents.

When they returned, she was pale and weak.
She had lost weight, but her eyes were bright with excitement, and she began a new painting the same day. Before she was able to finish it, an ambulance carried her off to the hospital. They hooked her up with wires and tubes, and her body under the bed sheet was like the stick-figures I drew at school.

She never came home. One afternoon my father sat me down in the kitchen and crouched before me, holding my hands, and told me in a voice he could barely control to pretend she was on another trip and that we’d see her again some day. Even at seven, I was too old for that crap. I was confused and terrified, but I knew my mother wasn’t on holiday.

I hardly saw my father after that. He held two jobs, the auto repair during the day, a department store at nights and on Saturdays. Neither one paid a decent wage. He was gone when I got up in the morning and never home before ten at night, when he’d drag himself into the apartment, eat, have a few beers, and fall asleep in front of the
TV
. When I was little, baby-sitters looked after me Saturdays and after school. When I got older, I took care of myself.

For a long time I thought he was burying himself in work because he missed my mom.
Then one day I realized it was more than that. He was paying back the thousands he had borrowed so he could take her to Italy. From the age of seven I grew up without parents. One was dead, one was a zombie who hardly spoke to me, who I often felt blamed me in some way for his wife’s deadly illness. Which was funny, because for a long time I blamed him.

I spent most of my life alone, without much help when my eyes dimmed from the dark rage that took hold of me and scared the hell out of me because I didn’t know what it was or how to deal with it.

“Y
OU SMELL LIKE ONIONS.”

“How’s it going, Your Majesty?” I said to the old woman beside me.

I poured myself a coffee and replaced the pot on the hot-plate under a sign that said

“If people want to ruin good Colombian,” Reena had told me more than a month ago when she showed me around Reena’s Unique Café for the first time, “they’ll have to pay for the privilege.”

I called the old lady “Your Majesty” because she spent all day circling the block, pushing a grocery cart piled high with her belongings and calling out, “I am the Queen of Sweden!” Rain or shine, she wore a long knitted scarf, striped blue and gold, and a dirty white toque. Where she slept at night, I had no idea—probably in the big park across the road.

“You smell like onions,” she repeated, dumping another spoonful of sugar into her coffee and stirring as if she was punishing it. “And your eyes are red.”

“Been slicing in the kitchen. For the soup of the day.”

“You work here?” she asked.

“Yeah. Chief busboy and onion chopper-upper.”

“Do you like it?”

“Not really, but I don’t have much choice.”

“Reena never mentioned you,” she said, and shuffled off to a table.

The Queen and I had had the same conversation half a dozen times. Her memory seemed to come and go, but she remembered to turn up at the café almost every morning.

A few more street people, their faces pale, their clothes tattered, sat around the tables Reena
kept at the back of the small restaurant, drinking coffee and staring into a personal nowhere. Reena let them have the coffee—and cookies, if she had any around—for nothing, as long as they were quiet and didn’t stay too long. She had a soft spot for people who floated on the edge of the stream, which is why she had taken me in.

Reena had given me the room on the third floor, up a narrow flight of creaky stairs from her apartment. There was space for a bed, a night table that was really an upended wooden box, an easy chair that was older than me, and one of those rugs made from one piece of material that spiralled out from the centre. No
TV
. No sound system, unless you counted the digital clock radio that read 10:00 a.m. all day. The ancient radiator thumped and gurgled at night.

I had my own bathroom with a shower, and the room was bright. The front window looked out over Lakeshore Boulevard and the park. If I craned my neck, I could glimpse the lake. From the side window I could see 18th Street and the run-down hotel where Carpino had parked the day he delivered me to Reena. It was an okay place to stay until I figured out my next move.

I carried my coffee to the booth nearest the counter. It was one of five that Reena had kept
when she renovated the place a few years before. Why she hung onto them, she never explained. They were covered in red vinyl pimpled by cigarette burns. A glass-fronted console attached to the wall above each scratched and pitted table allowed you to flip through a dozen panels and choose tunes by pushing buttons labelled with letters and numbers. The consoles had once been wired to a juke box, but the juke was gone, leaving orphaned songs like “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Hand Jive.”

The restaurant hummed with what Reena called the morning crowd—students from the college beside the park, stuffed with self-importance and thirsty for a caffeine fix, and regulars from the neighbourhood, sitting at the small tables and yakking or reading the paper while they sipped coffee and nibbled on muffins. Outside, the sun glinted off rush-hour windshields, and a streetcar rumbled and screeched to a stop at the traffic lights.

Behind me I heard the two-tone squeak of the swinging door to the kitchen. Reena slid into the booth across from me, an unfiltered cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She was wearing an almost-white apron, double-wrapped high above
her waist, and a hairnet. I glanced at the “Absolutely No Smoking” sign above the console.

I still felt like she had cooked things up with my father to keep me away from home. But Reena didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her, including me, so she didn’t play the role of the kindly, caring aunt. She hadn’t tried to reform me. I had my room and a job in her restaurant, busing tables, sweeping up, lending a hand in the kitchen. She paid me, after deducting for “room and board.” And she talked to me the same way she talked to everyone else, by showing respect and demanding it at the same time. It was understood that if I screwed up I would be gone.

We had reached that understanding one night about a week after Carpino dumped me at Reena’s place. I had lain awake for hours after I climbed the stairs to my room, staring at the illuminated digits on the clock radio. A one, a zero, a colon, two more zeroes. And beside the little tail that hung off the upper left corner of the one, the tiny white letters,
AM
, with a red dot glowing next to them. I focused on those numbers for a long time, knowing they would never change.

I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. I sneaked down the back stairs, threw on my coat,
and closed the door carefully behind me. I ran across the deserted road and into the park, skirting the darkened buildings, heading for a stand of evergreens by the lake. I planned to stay there, more or less out of sight, until the trains started up early next morning, then head west toward Hamilton.

Maybe “planned” isn’t the right word, because I hadn’t worked out what I’d do when I got home—and I hadn’t paid any attention to the weather. Gusts of freezing rain swept in from the lake, and within an hour my teeth were chattering, my hair was a helmet of ice, and every few seconds a shudder rattled my bones. Before long I found myself on the sidewalk beside the café, shoulders hunched against the cold, the side of my face burning from the sleet driven by the wind, banging on Reena’s door. It took her a long time to answer.