The Blue Helmet (7 page)

“Yup, that’s Cutter all right,” I replied, picking up the bag and heading for the back door.

Garbage bins and recycling boxes overflowing with cans and bottles stood like sentries along the curb on 13th Street. Pickup day. As I walked up Cutter’s sidewalk, pushing the tank, the curtain at the front window twitched. I rang the bell, stepped back and made a face at the camera.

“Come on in, Lee.”

Locks clicked and clacked. Cutter held the vestibule door open for me. “How are you?” he said pleasantly.

He led the way back to the kitchen. “Got time for a cup of tea?” he asked. “It’s all ready.” Cups, milk and sugar, and a teapot had been set out.

“I guess so.”

“Help yourself. Have you eaten?”

“Yeah.” I filled the mugs with coal-black tea. I wondered how long it had been brewing.

“Mind if I go ahead?” he asked, ripping open the bag. “I’m starved. I don’t always have a very good appetite.”

“No problem,” I said, and sipped my tea. It was strong enough to dissolve the enamel off my teeth.

Cutter seemed calm. His hair was combed, and he was wearing khakis and a cardigan over a white shirt. As if he was going to class. Not that I’d know how university students dressed. He ate slowly, forking the salad directly from the plastic container, taking small bites from the sandwich. His eye wasn’t twitching today.

Then he jumped up and scooted through to the office. I craned my neck to see what he was up to. He was bent over, holding the drape back a little, peering out the front window as if he didn’t want to be seen. He stood up and returned to his chair and took a bite from the sandwich.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Oh, just checking, just checking.” I waited. “The garbage,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Well, you know. Making sure no one is messing with it. Taking it.”

“You’re worried someone will take your garbage?”

“Yeah.”

This is going to be one of those Cutter conversations where we skate around in circles, I thought, holding back a laugh. I didn’t know whether I should humour him and keep talking, or let it go. But
not
talking would insult him, in a way. As if I thought he was a child and his conversation worthless.

“Isn’t that why you put it out? To be trucked away?”

“No. Yes. I mean, take as in rob.”

“Who would steal garbage?”

“They can find out everything about you by examining what comes out the back door,” he explained. “That’s why I use that big machine in the office. But even shredded paper can be reconstructed, I suppose.”

It was hard to imagine a ring of trash thieves terrorizing the neighbourhood, but he was right, in a way. In the movies, cops and spies often scrounged through trash for information.

“They look for records, right?” I said. “Phone bills, credit card statements, and stuff.”

“Right,” Cutter replied, his face brightening. “You can construct a very reliable profile of a household by analyzing what they throw away. Our garbage is a mirror of our lives. Only with mayonnaise or peanut butter smears on it.” He smiled, pleased at his joke.

“On the other hand, They already know everything about us. We live in an electronic wonderland. Most people have at least two bank credit cards, plus ones for gasoline, department stores, and so on. They don’t realize it, but all those corps exchange information about their clients. A lot of them sell the information to marketing companies. That’s where targeted junk mail comes from. There’s no such thing as privacy.”

If Cutter was aware that he was contradicting himself, he didn’t show it. If he was right, why would anyone need to go through his garbage? But the more I was with him, the more I saw that being consistent wasn’t part of the way his mind worked.

He popped the last bit of sandwich in his mouth and scrunched up the bag. “Feel like a walk?”

“You mean outside?”

“Of course. Just let me get my jacket.”

I didn’t mind going. It was entertaining, listening to his way-out theories, probably because they had a certain amount of truth to them—or sounded as if they did.

On the verandah, Cutter looked around, then plucked a hair from his head. He licked his fingers, ran the hair through the spit, and pressed it across the crack between the door and the frame.

“If anybody sneaks in while we’re gone—”

“You’ll be able to tell.”

“Exactly.”

I didn’t mention the back door.

On the way down the street, Cutter’s eyes darted from side to side. Every few steps he looked over his shoulder. Then he stopped as if he’d forgotten something.

“I’ve got to quit doing this,” he said, and started walking again.

I wondered if he’d wanted to take a stroll because he was planning to tell me more conspiracies and he figured his house was bugged. I shook my head. You’re getting paranoid, too, I told myself. Cut it out.

Around the corner of 13th and Lakeshore Drive, we passed through a gate in the high chain-link fence and entered the park. The lake was calm and slate-grey, the sky clear, the air chilly. To the
west, the stacks of the Lakeview power generating station stood out against the sky. We walked along the bike path, stepping aside for roller-bladers and people pushing strollers.

“This whole park,” Cutter said, ambling along, his shoulders hunched, his hands jammed into his pockets, “used to be a hospital for the mentally infirm. I read up on it after I moved here. It was actually a farm, and the inmates, the ones not locked down, grew vegetables and fruit. The idea was for the institution to be as self-sustaining as possible so it didn’t put too much burden on taxpayers. And experts in those days thought hard work was good for the patients. A lot of them were mentally retarded—the patients, that is. Then attitudes changed and drugs came along—a mixed blessing, believe me. Most of the inmates were released to other facilities, or onto the street.”

I thought of the Queen of Sweden and a few of the other astronauts who sat in the café in the mornings.

“The psychiatric hospital shut down,” Cutter went on. “For a few years the buildings and grounds were rented out to movie companies and
TV
shows. Then the college took over most of the buildings and fixed them up.”

He stopped and looked around. “I like to visit sometimes and sort of commune with the ghosts of the crazy people who used to live here.”

He didn’t say it, but I figured he was thinking that at one time he would have been one of the inmates, locked in a room behind bars, listening to the screamers as he tried to sleep.

“It’s not much fun being crazy,” he said, kicking a stone on the path.

I couldn’t think of anything to reply to that, so we walked in silence. I was feeling a little guilty, coming along because I thought Cutter might say something funny—to me, not to him.

“You’re a big help to me, Lee,” he said after a while. Which made me feel more guilty.

“Me? How? All I do is bring you your prescriptions and stuff.”

“You just are.”

A
S SPRING DRAGGED INTO
summer, the café customers traded their sweaters and jackets for T-shirts and shorts and skirts. Reena got the air conditioner serviced, added caesar and chef’s salads to the menu, and featured a fruit plate at lunch time. The chalkboard menu didn’t mention that all the pears and cherries and grapefruit segments came out of cans. The college crowd thinned out when classes ended and summer courses began. I never saw Eileen again.

One sunny morning, I was tucked into my booth composing sentences and writing them in my notebook, crossing out the ones that sounded wrong. “Ensconced” was my word for the day, and I was having trouble using it in ways
that didn’t sound stupid.

With my pen I drew a circle around the first “e” of ensconced and coloured in the “o.”

“You’re outta cream,” I heard from someone beside my booth. Someone who hadn’t washed in a long while.

I looked up. “The Queen of Sweden was ensconced beside my booth,” I wrote, then scribbled it out and threw down my pen.

“Morning, Your Majesty,” I sighed.

“Never mind that, you’re outta cream,” she said.

I went into the kitchen, where Reena was flipping eggs on the grill, and took a jug of milk from the fridge and carried it to the coffee bar.

“There you go,” I said to the Queen.

She nodded, her greasy grey hair falling across her face. She tossed the loose end of her blue and gold scarf over her shoulder—no warm weather clothes for her—and went about preparing her coffee. “Bad mood today?” she asked.

I returned to the booth and wrote, “The Queen’s milk was ensconced in the café fridge.” Satisfied, I closed the notebook and picked up my mug of Colombian.

The night before, Reena had called me down from my room on the third floor just as I was
about to hit the sack. She was sitting in her easy chair, smoking, her glass of red on the chair arm, the evening news flickering on the muted
TV
. Her feet, clad in oversized fuzzy pink slippers, rested on a hassock.

“I need to have a talk with you,” she had said, smoke streaming from her nostrils.

Dread blossomed in my chest. I stood in her doorway, one hand on the jamb. She’s going to kick me out, I thought, anger seeping into my mind. She’s had enough of me. That fight in the café a few weeks ago did it. Well, it wasn’t as if I didn’t deserve it, but leaving would be hard. More than I realized, I liked living with her. True, I had nothing to go “home” to, but it was more than that. I had thought she liked me.

“I guess I’m going back to my old man’s,” I said bitterly.

Reena looked at me over the rim of her wine glass. Her brow creased. “What makes you say that?’

“That’s why you called me down here, isn’t it?”

“You’re way off base, Lee,” she said. “Sit down and relax. Jesus, you’re always so wound up.”

I lowered myself to the edge of the bed. “Okay, what?”

“I spoke to your dad last night.”

Here it comes, I thought.

“And, well, I have to tell you, he feels real bad about you not wanting to talk to him.”

She paused, and I said nothing.

“But that’s another story. Anyhow, he’s agreed if you agree. I’d like you to stay on here for as long as you want. You’re a big help to me, running the café. You’re not the cheeriest angel in the choir. And,” she smiled, “you can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but you work hard, and I like having you around. So, what do you say?”

I swallowed. My mouth was so dry I could hardly get my tongue to move. “Okay,” I managed.

“Don’t knock me over with your enthusiasm.”

“No, really, I want to.”

“Good.”

I climbed the stairs to my room, shaking with relief, sat on my bed and looked around, and for the first time thought of it as just that—my room.

So the Queen had been dead wrong when she asked if I was in a foul mood. Just as she shuffled past the booth on her way to the door, my cell phone began to describe a lazy circle on the table. I picked it up.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a severe thunderstorm watch out for today. Keep your eye on the western sky from about three o’clock on.”

“Hi, Abe.”

“Howya this morning, Lee?”

“Good.”

“Listen, you interested in another client? My lawyer—she’s up on 8th Street in the old town hall building—she’d like to have you do the odd delivery for her.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Great. I’ll give her your number, if that’s all right.”

“Sure, Abe.”

“Drop by today, if you get a chance, willya? I got some paperwork to send up to Lakshmi—that’s the lawyer.”

Abe was a bookkeeper for a few small businesses on the Lakeshore. He also did tax returns for some of his neighbours.

“You can meet her then. Catch up with you later. Don’t forget your raincoat.” He broke the connection.

Cutter had bought me the phone a couple of weeks before, and he paid the fees. “I need to
know I can get in touch with you whenever,” he had told me. I asked if he minded if I used the phone for other deliveries. Could I give the number to Abe, Andrea, and Reena?

“No problem, good idea,” he had replied. “But always remember, your calls are easy to monitor. They have microwave dishes all over town, hunting down signals. Keep your calls short and don’t give too much away. Be vague. That throws Them off.”

I saw Cutter three or four times a week now. I guess I worked for him, although it wasn’t like that. I took his mail to the post office, delivered meals from the café, cleaned up his kitchen, brought him his pills and took the empties to Andrea, picked up books at the library and returned them when he was finished with them. I wasn’t allowed to touch anything in his office, though, and I was absolutely forbidden to go upstairs.

We talked a lot, too. Cutter was lonely. And he was an interesting guy—hard to follow sometimes, but if I paid close attention to what he was saying, most of it made sense, eventually. Sometimes I told him about what I was reading. I had made my way through
The Old Man and the Sea
—it wasn’t really about fishing—and
Clancy had gotten me onto some other Hemingways.

One minute I felt sorry for Cutter, another, I admired him. He was brilliant, just like Andrea had said. His brain was like his office, jammed with facts and ideas, and, like his computers, he analyzed things with blinding speed that left me standing with my mouth open, like someone in the street who’d missed his bus. He saw things in the stories I described, even if he hadn’t read them, and when I thought about what he said I realized he was right. At other times he seemed bewildered and helpless, like a kid lost in a big park. And at still others, when he was way down, he’d move and speak like a zombie, unconnected to the world. He’d get me down, too. On those days I didn’t stay long.

Although we were different in every way, we had one thing in common. We didn’t fit in.

Cutter was full of contradictions. He thought They got into his computers and monitored his phone calls, yet he had a lock on his mailbox. If They could watch him electronically, I reasoned, They could open his mail, couldn’t They? And who steals mail, anyway? He knew They were after him because he exposed Their evil designs, but he faithfully took his meds (or said he did).