Easy Avenue Read online

  Other Books by Brian Doyle

  BOY O’BOY

  MARY ANN ALICE

  THE LOW LIFE

  UNCLE RONALD

  SPUD IN WINTER

  SPUD SWEETGRASS

  COVERED BRIDGE

  ANGEL SQUARE

  UP TO LOW

  YOU CAN PICK ME UP AT PEGGY’S COVE

  HEY, DAD!

  Easy Avenue

  EASY AVENUE

  Brian Doyle

  Copyright © 1988 by Brian Doyle

  New paperback edition 2003

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 500, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  National Library of Canada

  Cataloguing in Publication

  Doyle, Brian

  Easy Avenue

  ISBN 0-88899-605-5

  I. Title

  PS8557.O87E28 2004 jC813’.54 C2003-906499-9

  Cover photograph by Tim Fuller

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  To Fay, John, Jo, Kelly,

  Tobias, Eliza, John Peter,

  Wylie and Gabriel

  And to Mike, Jenny, Sarah,

  Moira, Simon and Rowan

  And to Jackie, Megan and Ryan

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1 The World’s Worst Golfer

  2 Drowned in the War

  3 Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell

  4 Picnic

  5 Help Wanted

  6 Betrayed at the Glebe Collegiate Institute

  7 Job!

  8 Light the Light

  9 Easy Avenue

  10 Success

  11 Mysterious Money

  12 Uppity

  13 Feel Street

  14 Sixty-Four Pieces

  15 Uranus

  16 A Deal with Doug

  17 Just Like Something O’Driscoll Would Do

  1 The World’s Worst Golfer

  MY LAST NAME is O’Driscoll and my first name is Hulbert. When I was little I couldn’t say the word Hulbert very well. The word Hulbert came out something like Hubbo, and everybody started calling me that. They still call me that. Hubbo. Hubbo O’Driscoll.

  There were lots of O’Driscolls in Lowertown, Ottawa. There was the O’Driscoll who was a policeman who took his holidays around Christmas so he could work at playing Santa Claus at Woolworth’s on Rideau Street.

  He’s not in this story.

  There were other people in Lowertown that you might know. Tommy, I don’t know his last name, who thought he was The Shadow. He’s not in this story either. Well, maybe he is, once. And Killer Bodnoff.

  And Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell. You might know her. You might have heard of her. She is in this story.

  My first memory about moving from Lowertown to our new place to live at the Uplands Emergency Shelter is not about moving there or about the bus to get out there, but it is about a place right next to Uplands Emergency Shelter. The golf course. The Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club, where I got a job caddying just a few days after we moved near there in the summer.

  And where something happened.

  Everybody in the Uplands Emergency Shelter was poor, and of course everybody at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club was rich, except the caddies.

  We made seventy-five cents for caddying eighteen holes. And maybe a tip. I was one of the lucky ones though; I made a dollar fifty for eighteen holes because I was Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald’s special caddy. Nobody wanted to caddy for Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald because he was such a rotten golfer and he had such a vicious temper. His face would get red and his eyes would begin to bulge out when his ball would take off into the bush, which was practically every time he hit it. And he would often throw his club into the bush too. I would have to go and get it and also find his ball for him.

  His ball would be so far into the bush that I’d either never find it or if I did it would be in a hopeless place and he’d get mad all over again.

  I used to find a lot of other golf balls while I was in there looking for Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald’s ball, and when I’d find one that was his brand I’d keep it so that sometimes I’d be able to drop one in not a bad place alongside the fairway in the rough grass and tell him it was his so he’d have a shot at it without taking a penalty.

  He always played alone and even though he yelled and screamed almost all the way over the eighteen holes I knew he wasn’t mad at me; he was mad at the golf bag, the ball, the clubs, the golf course, the trees, the bunkers, the rocks, the bushes, the water, the greens, the tee, the pin and himself.

  He didn’t seem to have any friends. Except maybe me.

  Sometimes when we’d be waiting for other golfers and there was nothing to do I would practice my hand-stand and my round-off back handspring. He used to like that. It even made him smile sometimes.

  He played two rounds every Saturday and two rounds every Sunday. And I was his personal caddy.

  He said he played to let off steam.

  Letting off steam meant that all week steam would build up inside him (not real steam) and on the weekends he’d have to let it out or he would explode.

  The last time I ever caddied for him something bad happened.

  I came out of the bush with one of his golf clubs and got a funny feeling that something was wrong. I couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Then I saw two golf shoes, the toes pointing into the ground behind the ball washer. There were legs attached to the shoes.

  When I got to him his fingers were clawing the grass and his mouth was sucking in dirt. The back of his neck and his ears were bluish gray.

  His golf bag was lying a few steps away where he had been trying to tee off. That’s why I didn’t see him fall. I was in the bush looking for one of his golf clubs that he threw in there after his first bad shot.

  I unzipped the pocket of the bag where I knew he kept those pills. I knew everything he had in his bag because he’d get me to try and tidy it up after the first nine holes each time while he went into the clubhouse for something to drink and to relax.

  He had to go in to let off some more steam.

  His bag was always a wreck because of all the things he did to it when he was mad, which was most of the time.

  Jumping up and down on your golf bag with those spiked shoes isn’t good for it. Jumping up and down with both feet scars and tears the leather of a golf bag. And kicking it along the fairway. And throwing your golf bag into creeks and mud holes is bad for it. And so is swinging your golf bag by the strap with both hands, beating it against rough pine-tree trunks. And throwing it into sand traps. And lifting very heavy rocks over your head and crushing your golf bag with those rocks.

  Or using your golf club like an ax and chopping your golf bag. He did these things all the time.

  He would hit his ball as hard as he could and the ball would head right for the bush, bounce off a tree, and disappear. Or he would try to hit the ball and it would dribble just a few yards away.

  Then he would attack th
e bag.

  Then I would pick it up and carry it to where his ball was (unless it was in the bush) and give him his next club and he would try again. Then he would probably hit the ball on the very top and it would fly straight up in the air and come back down almost in the same place and then he’d throw his club away over into the bush and while I ran to get it he would attack the bag again.

  He never got mad at me. Usually the bag.

  This was why I knew everything about his golf bag. Each time he went into the clubhouse to let off steam I would work on the bag. Get it back in shape. I would clean it off with a rag and soap and water and then while it was drying I would go through the pockets cleaning out the mud and sand and broken trees and stuff. And I’d rub the bag down with protective wax and maybe put some shellac I’d get from the pro shop on the gashes and cuts in the leather.

  He had his name printed inside a little plastic window on the bag. Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald. Sometimes I’d say it over like a little song:

  Donald D. DonaldmcDonald,

  Donald D. DonaldmcDonald,

  Donald D. Donald,

  Donald D. Donald,

  Donald D. DonaldmcDonald.

  I was pretty good at saying it. I was a much better pronouncer than I was when I was little and couldn’t even say Hulbert.

  And I always wanted to ask him what his initial D. stood for, but I never did.

  As I was saying, I knew his golf bag very well. That’s why I knew what those pills were and what they were for. It said so right on the bottle. He was lying there on his stomach with his face in the grass. His fingers were out like claws, clawing the grass like our cat used to claw the blanket on the bed down in Lowertown. The back of his neck and his cheeks were a bluish gray color.

  There was nobody around and the golf course was as quiet as a graveyard. A squirrel bounced up to us and stopped to watch. I got out the bottle of pills from the bag and twisted off the top. The little sign on the bottle said, “Place glycerine pill under tongue. If mouth dry moisten with drops of water.”

  There was a tap sticking up out of the grass down by the ladies’ tee. I ran down there and turned on the tap and cupped my hands under it. The water was gushing out so fast I couldn’t get much to stay in my hands. I ran back up to him holding my hands high out in front of me. There wasn’t much left when I got there but there was enough to wet his mouth. I looked around on the grass where I left the pills. They weren’t there. I crawled around slapping the grass looking for the bottle. I looked up and saw the squirrel hopping away with it in his mouth. I let out a yell and he dropped it and bounced away a few times and stopped. A bold little guy. I crawled over monkey style and got the bottle.

  Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald gave out a long groan to me as I shoved a pill under his tongue with my finger.

  I got out some driver covers and made a little pillow for the side of his head so his mouth wouldn’t roll back into the grass. I looked to see if anybody was around to help.

  The squirrel was sitting up, still as a statue, watching. The heat bugs were singing.

  I looked down the fairway to see how far I’d have to run to the clubhouse. He gave out another long groan and his throat muscles started working.

  I ran as fast as I could down the fairway and cut across to the first tee. In the clubhouse I explained what happened between breaths. They called an ambulance and we jumped on the sod truck and drove right down the middle of the fairway to where he was. When we got there he was trying to sit up. His face was white but not bluish anymore, and his eyes were fuzzy and unfocused. We helped him onto some sod on the back of the truck and I threw his clubs on and we drove off.

  We met the ambulance half way up the fairway and the men put him on their stretcher and slid him into the back of the ambulance.

  I told them about the pill.

  “Lucky for him you knew about the pills,” one of the ambulance guys said. “Probably saved his life.”

  As they were putting him in the ambulance, tucking in his blanket, his eyes got a bit clear and he looked right at me. With his free arm Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald reached over and weakly squeezed me on the shoulder.

  Then they shut the door and drove off with the siren crying.

  I reached up and touched my shoulder where Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald squeezed it a bit to see what he had felt there. How it felt to him.

  I never caddied again.

  2 Drowned in the War

  MY DAD was run over by a streetcar. He lay down on the streetcar tracks for a rest during a snowstorm. The driver couldn’t see very well because of the blowing snow and ran over him. I never knew him because that happened when I was just a baby.

  My mom died when I was born.

  I guess you could say I was kind of an orphan.

  I lived with Mrs. O’Driscoll. She was married to a distant cousin of my dad’s. I thought of her as my mother and I loved her and at school and everywhere I said she was my mother but at home I always called her Mrs. O’Driscoll. It was a warm little joke we had between us.

  After we moved to Uplands Emergency Shelter Mrs. O’Driscoll got a job as a cleaning lady at Glebe Collegiate Institute. Glebe Collegiate Institute was a big high school in the southern part of Ottawa. The high school where I would go that fall.

  Mrs. O’Driscoll’s husband, Mr. O’Driscoll, was drowned in the war. In the Pacific Ocean. Mr. O’Driscoll was a wild kind of man with red hair and freckles on the backs of his hands and on his neck. He laughed a lot and he liked making jokes. Bad jokes.

  The day he drowned he was talking with a man, making jokes and rolling a cigarette in the front part of the ship, on the main deck. Suddenly there was a dull sort of a thud and the horns started going and the ship started sinking.

  The man who was rolling the cigarette shook hands with Mr. O’Driscoll and they said goodbye, they’d see each other later, and they both jumped in the water. One over one side of the boat and one over the other side.

  The man rolling the cigarette got saved and came around to our house after the war and told us all about it.

  Mr. O’Driscoll didn’t get saved.

  Just before he jumped overboard, Mr. O’Driscoll yelled out to his friend, “If I don’t see you in the spring, I’ll see you in the mattress!”

  As you can see, Mr. O’Driscoll was quite a funny guy.

  It was a joke mixing up spring, the season, with the spring in a bed. I guess it would be something one bedbug would say to another bedbug. Maybe Mr. O’Driscoll mentioned the bedbugs but the wind was howling too loud or there were too many explosions and things and the man rolling the cigarette didn’t hear that part.

  I remember when the man came to see us and tell us about Mr. O’Driscoll’s last moments. We already knew how drowned he was because of the letter Mrs. O’Driscoll got from the government. The letter said he was “missing.”

  After she opened it and read it she said, “He never was much of a swimmer.” She said this the way she said everything. Out of the side of her mouth. Then she cried for about three days.

  When the friend showed up a few months later he had trouble finding us.

  We lived in Building Number Eight, Unit B, Uplands Emergency Shelter.

  We had to move there from Lowertown because of the housing shortage after the war. The person who owned our house on St. Patrick Street in Lowertown sold it to somebody and we had to move out.

  He came over to our house at the end of June on my last day of public school at York Street and told us. I came down St. Patrick Street with all my books and my report that said I passed, On Condition, and there he was, standing on the steps, talking to Mrs. O’Driscoll, telling her that we had to get out.

  On Condition meant if you didn’t do very well in grade nine, they’d send you back to grade eight. I wasn’t a very good student.

  “I suppose you know what you can do with your house,” I heard Mrs. O’Driscoll say to the man out of the corner of her mouth. But she saved the very corner
of her mouth for special occasions.

  She looked around for another place to live in Lowertown, but there weren’t any. Finally, in July, she told me.

  “We’re going to Uplands Emergency Shelter,” she said. “It’s an air force base about ten miles south of Ottawa. Uplands Emergency Shelter.” She said “Emergency Shelter” out of such a tight corner of her mouth that I could hardly understand it at first.

  But the tightest corner of her mouth I ever heard her use was the corner she used when I told her about the mysterious money I was getting from somewhere.

  “Mysterious money?” she said.

  But that was after school started.

  3 Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell

  ALL SUMMER, families with nowhere to live were moving into Uplands Emergency Shelter.

  Families with screaming babies and piles of brothers and sisters and broken trucks and torn furniture and tubs full of junk and mop handles pointing out and pails with leftover food and blankets tied with rope and bent beds and stained mattresses and ice boxes with the doors hanging and bureaus stuck in passageways and fat tires and homemade shelves and cracked dishes and three-legged chairs and twisted curtain rods and coiled springs sticking out of ripped sofas and yelling and swearing.

  The mother of the new family moving into our building had a black eye and a cast on her wrist. She wouldn’t look at anybody.

  I recognized the girl carrying in the broken lamp. I asked her if she wanted some help and she said no. She had black curly long hair tied at the back with a white rag. She had brown-black eyes and long black eyelashes and very white skin.

  She didn’t say no in a mean way but you knew that she meant it. She wasn’t just being polite or shy or proud or anything like that. You could tell that she just meant no.

  I remembered her from York Street School. I was never in her class but I remembered that Killer Bodnoff and some of the guys would sneak over into the girls’ schoolyard and chase her and her friends and throw snow at them and try to kiss them. Killer used to say that she would even take guys into her back shed with her on Friel Street. He used to call it Feel Street. He used to say that she was dirty.