The Blue Helmet (3 page)

“Forgot your key, I suppose,” she said, standing in her nice warm vestibule wearing furry pink slippers, holding her woollen robe closed at her throat.

She knew damn well why I was standing out in the cold. “Yeah, right,” I said.

“You look like a drowned cat.”

“If you’re planning to apply for the Mother of
the Year award, I wouldn’t bother,” I said, pushing past her and clomping up the stairs.

But she made me come back down to the kitchen after I had changed my clothes, and she sat me down at the table.

“Look, Lee, even a fool knows when he’s got no choices left.”

“I guess you’re right,” I admitted.

“So, give this place a chance. It won’t be so bad. If you want to call up your friends once in a while, I don’t mind. Long distance to Hamilton isn’t very expensive.”

“Okay,” I replied, suddenly tired. “I’m going to bed now.”

I returned to the room upstairs, lay down in my clothes, and looked at the clock. I didn’t tell her that I had no friends to call, anyway.

Now, sitting across from me in the booth, squinting against the smoke, she asked, “In the mood for a surprise?”

“I guess,” I answered.

“Come on.”

She led me through the kitchen and out the back door into the tiny courtyard, an area about the size of four cars parked side by side, enclosed by a two-metre-high brick wall. Huge flowerpots waited for the spring planting. Lawn furniture,
rusting at the edges, had been shoved into one corner. Against the wall near the steel-clad door stood a bicycle.

“I’ve decided, if you agree, to start a delivery service,” Reena said. “Solid, longtime customers only. And a few who aren’t quite ready for Meals-On-Wheels but find home service convenient. Maybe a few deliveries a day.”

“With that?” I said.

It was a hybrid, a cross between a street bike and mountain bike. The olive paint job was scaly and blotched with rust.

“Nobody,” I said, “will want to steal
this
thing. It looks like a stripped-down tank.”

“I don’t know from bikes, but a friend told me it’s in good condition. Said I could have it cheap.”

I crouched and looked closer. Eighteen gears, no springs or shocks, wide tires with street treads, straight handlebars showing rust at the welds. A chain shiny with oil, new cables, clean hubs. A crappy-looking but well-maintained rig.

“Yeah, it’s in good shape,” I admitted. “I take it I’m the new delivery boy.”

She pushed a strand of blonde hair off her forehead and grinned. “Let’s say ‘courier.’ It sounds classier.”

“How do you know I won’t take off one day and never come back?”

“If you do, send back the bike. It cost me a hundred bucks. Anyway, what do you think?”

I was attracted by the idea of getting away from the boredom of the restaurant from time to time. And I liked the fact that Reena had said “if you agree.”

“We’ll need a good lock,” I said. “And a rack. And pannier bags to carry the deliveries. Oh, and a map. I grew up in Hamilton, you know.”

“Well,” Reena said, flaming a new cigarette, “nobody’s perfect.”

A
COUPLE OF DAYS
later, my first delivery took me to a home right on the lake at the bottom of 12th Street. The long, one-storey building looked more like a miniature factory than a house. Reena had warned me to be polite to the customers and had given me a long list of useless instructions. How hard can it be, I asked myself. Drop off the bag and leave. I didn’t even have to handle the money—all the orders would be put on account.

Reena had said to take the food to the back door, so I coasted down the driveway into the yard, parked the tank against the house, and lifted the bag of food out of the pannier. There were whitecaps on the lake and a couple of
Canada geese waddled across the lawn as if they owned the place. In the middle of the yard, a contraption shaped like an upended pail with a small box stuck on the side sat atop a pole. A little propeller turned slowly on the end of a rod that curved up and away from the main body.

I rapped on the door. A voice thundered from somewhere inside. “Yeah?”

“Reena’s,” I shouted, pushing the door open.

“Nope, this is Abe’s.” I heard a booming laugh. “Just kidding. Come through to the study. Dump the goodies on the kitchen table on your way by.”

I went inside. A wide-shouldered man shouted a greeting—“Howya doing?”—from a chair where he sat tapping furiously on a computer keyboard. A spreadsheet filled the screen. On another monitor, coloured shapes jerked across a map of North America as if pulled by an invisible string. A large photo of a middle-aged woman had been placed between the computers. Cigar smoke hung in the air like a blue mist, and an empty glass stood on the desk beside a whiskey bottle and an ice bucket.

The man gave one last tap and slowly swivelled around to face me. His bald head was
fringed with greying hair, and he wore a white shirt and dark tie under a paisley vest. A cigar jutted from the corner of his mouth, smoke curling from the long ash at the tip.

“Take a seat,” he said, his voice like gravel.

I lifted a stack of printed sheets from the only other chair in the room and put them on the floor.

“Cuppa tea or coffee?” he offered.

“No, thanks. I’m okay.”

“I’d offer you a drink, but you’re driving,” he chuckled as he reached for the bottle and poured a couple of inches of whiskey into the glass. Ice cubes clinked as he took a sip.

“So you’re Reena’s nephew,” he said.

“Yup.”

“I’m Abe Krantz. And you’re—?”

“Lee.”

“Reena’s a
mensch
. She and my late wife were great friends. I was happy to hear she’s starting a delivery service. Makes things easy for me. I don’t like to cook much. I guess I’ll be seeing you a few times a week. I don’t get much company.”

“I—”

“Central to Charlie three.”

I looked up towards the source of the static
and tinny voice. A small object the size of a desk phone, plastered with coloured buttons, sat on a shelf beside a row of reference books.

“It’s a scanner,” Krantz explained, picking up a remote. “Also a two-way shortwave radio.” He pressed a button and a metallic computerized voice reeled off temperature and humidity, then started into a weather forecast. Krantz thumbed another button and the lights on the radio died. “Lets me listen in on the cops, fire department, ambulances and other stuff. Also the weather, including marine. I’m a watcher.”

“A what?”

“Did you happen to notice my weather station in the yard?”

“Um …”

“That ungainly looking thing on the pole?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“It measures precipitation, temp, humidity, wind velocity and direction, and a few other things, then feeds the data to the receiver on the wall over there.”

He pointed to a grey box with an
LED
screen full of numbers. “It’s wireless. And it downloads to the computer every two hours. Also wirelessly. The computer compiles the data, develops local forecasts, charts patterns, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Great,” I said.

“So I always know what the weather will be tomorrow and forward.”

“Why not just listen to the radio? I mean, the normal one.”

“Because it isn’t very accurate. Besides, this is more fun. There’s lots more to it.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, thinking, sounds pretty lame to me.

Krantz laughed. “We’ve barely met and I’ve already bored you to death with everything you didn’t want to know about weather-watching. What do I owe you for the take-out?”

“Reena said she’d run a tab for you.”

“Okay, well, let me give you something for dropping it off.”

I got to my feet. “That’s okay. Delivery’s free.”

He took out his wallet and handed me a five-dollar bill. “Maybe so, but take this anyway. As a favour to me.”

I stuffed the bill into my pants pocket.

“Forgive me if I don’t see you out,” Krantz said. “Put the lock on the back door when you go, will you?”

“Sure. And thanks.”

“See you soon,” he said, and turned back to the keyboard. “And take your umbrella with you
tomorrow. It’s gonna rain.”

I climbed onto the tank and wheeled out onto the street. Five bucks tip, I thought. This courier thing is okay.

That night, just after I climbed the stairs to my room, the phone rang in Reena’s apartment. After she spoke for a few minutes, she called out, “Lee, it’s for you.”

The phone was in her kitchen. She was sitting at the little table by the window, a glass of wine beside the newspaper, a smoking cigarette in the ashtray beside it.

I picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Lee, it’s Dad.”

I hesitated for a moment, then, without saying anything, cut the connection. Reena looked up from her paper, her face neutral.

“See you in the morning,” I said.

I trudged back upstairs and threw myself onto my bed, facing the wall. I knew he’d call back, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a few days. He’d keep at it. He was stubborn—“determined,” he used to say to my mother. “Bullheaded,” she’d reply with a smile.

I rolled over and kicked off my shoes, my eyes
coming to rest on a plastic tumbler on my night table. I had brought it upstairs earlier in the evening, full of cola. I remembered the mornings when I was a little kid. When I got up and padded into the kitchen, cotton-headed with sleep and rubbing my eyes, my breakfast would be ready. My own special cereal bowl with my name printed in a line around the inside of the rim,
LeeLeeLee
, in one continuous word. My own white plastic tumbler with the red spaceship on the side in a cloud of blue stars, full of apple juice. A big silver spoon with CN engraved on the handle. A carton of cold milk and a box of puffed wheat—unsweetened because Mom was always on a campaign against refined sugar. Mom sitting in her housecoat, reading the paper.

The morning after she was rushed to the hospital, my father had laid out my breakfast, and when I came into the kitchen and saw it, I freaked, knocking the milk carton onto the floor, flinging the cereal box across the room, sweeping the glass and bowl off the table, crying and screaming.

“What’s the matter?” my father said over and over as I wailed. “What’s the matter?” He finally figured out what I had been unable to explain. He had put out the wrong bowl, used
the wrong glass, chosen the wrong spoon. He mopped up the lake of milk and puffed wheat, and made things right. I ate my breakfast, sniffling, not sure what had happened. From then on, the morning routine never changed.

But I guess I did. I stopped eating puffed wheat. Stopped breakfast altogether, even stopped gulping down the juice as I flew out the door, late for school. When I was in high school, right up to the day he kicked me out, I saw the same damn bowl and spoon and tumbler in the same damn place at the table every morning. Like he was making some kind of point. Like he was trying to preserve something we both knew was gone.

B
EFORE
I
BEGAN THE
day’s assassination of soup vegetables, Reena handed me a paper bag and asked me to take it to Andrea, the pharmacist. I hung up my apron and perched my paper hat on the knife block.

The Lakeshore Pharmacy occupied the corner of Lakeshore Boulevard and 17th Street, a block east of the restaurant. I knocked at the back door off the alley that ran behind the buildings fronting Lakeshore Boulevard. Andrea Gauthier was a small, good-looking woman with brown eyes and long chestnut hair. She came into the café once in a while. I handed her the bag, warm and aromatic from the hot coffee and muffins inside.

“Thanks, Lee,” she said, placing the package on a table surrounded by cartons and shelves packed with overstock.

“No sweat,” I replied, turning to go.

“Um, Lee, do you have a minute?”

The door hissed shut. “Sure.”

Andrea sat down and opened the bag, pried the lid off the coffee, and took a sip, letting out a contented sigh. She dug for a muffin. “Reena says you’re doing take-out on wheels now.”

“Yeah, just started last week.”

“I was wondering, would you be interested in making the odd delivery for us? I’d clear it with Reena first, of course,” she said around a mouthful of muffin when she saw me hesitate. “I could pay you up front each time. We have an account system for our regulars—you know, the shut-ins and so on, so you wouldn’t have to keep track of any money. What do you say?”

I couldn’t explain to her why I hesitated, could hardly put it into words for myself. I wasn’t used to people relying on me. The other day Abe Krantz had invited me into his home, given me a tip, trusted me to leave and lock the door behind me. It’s okay to be depended on, but it’s also another chance to screw up.

Andrea had small, even teeth and full lips,
and when she smiled the corners of her eyes turned up a fraction.

“Sure,” I said. “Any time.” I didn’t tell her that I would have couriered for her for free.

“Well, how about this afternoon? I have a prescription for a guy over on 13th Street. He, er, doesn’t get out much.”

“One of the shut-ins?”

“More of a
stay-in
. He’s a little, well, unusual. Say, about two?” she added, without elaborating.

“See you then,” I said.