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Spud in Winter Page 2
Spud in Winter Read online
Page 2
You want to switch it off.
I’m in French class, trying to change the channel in my head.
I’m watching our French teacher, Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre, trying to teach us French.
None of the guys in the class can learn any French from Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre because of the way she looks. She wears long dresses that are so tight that when she walks she has to take tiny steps. It takes about twenty steps for her to get from her desk to the blackboard.
And she wears high heels so high that she’s almost on tiptoes as she tries to get to the blackboard. When she finally gets there, all the guys in the class have completely forgotten about what she just tried to teach us in French.
She has about ten different types of bracelets on her left arm, the arm she writes on the blackboard with. While she’s writing, she uses her right hand to push her long golden hair back over her shoulder while the bracelets on her left arm play sort of a little French song.
All this makes the guys want to jump up and start dancing or rapping. It doesn’t make them want to learn French, though.
Mademoiselle Tarte au Sucre wears so much perfume that you can start to smell her out in the hall even before she gets in the room.
Her fingernails are painted with stuff that glows in the dark. On some days she has a pretty little stencil of a bug of some kind on each nail. A butterfly, a grasshopper, a ladybug, maybe. It must take hours to put all this stuff on.
Dink the Thinker once said he estimated that she would have to get up at four o’clock in the morning to have enough time to get herself ready to come to work.
She wears a silver bracelet around her ankle and a locket on a chain around her throat, shaped like a heart.
A lot of the guys say that inside the locket she has a picture of The Cyclops.
I don’t know why, but I always burst out laughing every time I hear that. I see, in my mind, The Cyclops with his one eye, leaning close, studying the little bugs on Tarte au Sucre’s fingernails.
Now I’m replaying yesterday again. I can’t help it.
It’s minus 32 degrees now. A record for this day in Ottawa.
The dead crook in the parking lot doesn’t mind the cold.
And the big crowd that’s growing there, they’re ready to put up with anything to get a look at the dead body. They want to see the cops, feel the excitement.
Mothers with their kids and grampas and grannies of all shapes and sizes and colors have come to see. People have poured out of the Village Inn to have a look. People hanging out of upstairs windows, standing in doorways hugging themselves, going back for coats, crowding on the verandas and in the laneways.
Cars double-parked all over the place and lights flashing and sirens bleeping and crying. People shouting and laughing and giving orders.
The police want to know who phoned them.
“Is the individual present who first notified police via 911 regarding this incident?” a big fat policeman is shouting into a horn.
“Would the responsible citizen be kind enough to come forward and identify himself? We’d appreciate your cooperation. Thank you!”
The fog coming from the cars and the open doors and windows of the houses and the breaths of the crowd is getting so thick that the star of the show is starting to disappear. The main attraction. You can hardly see the blood in the snow and the pink shirt and the fur coat over the legs.
People are talking and giggling and stomping their feet and banging their mitts together. It’s like a party.
There’s a little kid propped up in a snowbank. He’s so wrapped up he doesn’t look human. There’s another kid in a wooden box which is nailed to a toboggan. He’s got so many clothes on he can’t move his arms or turn his head. His mother, who is pulling the toboggan, has hardly any clothes on at all. A little short skirt, tiny high-heeled boots, a short little coat, a hat about the size of a snowball. Earmuffs the shape of baby rabbits. Her throat is bare. It shows a big gold necklace.
Somebody says the temperature is now down to minus 33 degrees. Another record for this day. People argue. How can you have two records set in one day? There’s only one record-cold temperature!
My friend Dink the Thinker would now tell you the estimated temperature of the gold necklace around the mother’s throat. He knows stuff like that.
Over there is a bag lady with two shopping carts tied together with a chain. The carts are tied side by side and she’s stuck in the snow. Back and forward, back and forward cursing, stuck, the wheels stuck in the snow. Both carts are packed full. She can’t get one more thing in there. But what is all that stuff? Can anybody tell what she’s got in there? What she’s collecting?
Why am I noticing all these things? Maybe it’s because I’m avoiding thinking what I should be thinking of. “Avoiding the issue,” my mom calls it.
Here come a couple of kids dressed up in the latest style. The latest style is easy to figure out. Just make sure everything you wear is ten times too big for you.
And make sure that from the back, the ass of your pants looks like you just dumped a big load in there. There’s enough cloth in the pants on these two geeks to keep all the bag ladies in the city of Ottawa warm all winter long.
And then to be right in style make sure your hat is too small for you. It helps if your head is pointed. These kids are right in style. One of them has a head so pointed he could wear a thimble for a hat. The other one has a head shaped like a banana.
Why am I thinking about these things? To avoid thinking about what I have to think about, that’s why.
There’s a jogger coming through the huge crowd. There’s stuff hanging from his mustache. It’s ice. Icicles are also growing out of his nose. As he comes through the crowd, he says excuse me, excuse me.
Even a murder won’t stop a jogger. If a guy was lying dead on the road, a jogger would probably step right over him and keep going.
There’s a Vietnamese kid letting some other kids in his back door so they can go up on the wooden balcony where his mother has her clothesline. They can watch the show from there. The kid is charging admission. A bite of your chocolate bar. A quarter. A hockey card.
Over here, two dogs are fighting while another one watches.
And friends of the shot crook are standing around the cafe.
Shocked. They were just talking to him a few minutes ago, weren’t they? How could you be dead if you were alive just a few minutes ago?
I notice all these things to keep one thing out of my mind.
Should I talk to the police?
Will I be in danger?
Can a person look at you without seeing you?
Will Connie Pan be in danger?
Did the driver of the brown van see, that day he was looking in the mirror in the beauty salon, putting on his scarf, admiring his hair, did he see that Connie Pan, his hairdresser, was a friend of mine? Did he see me?
Now, who’s this coming through the crowd?
A woman in a kind of ski outfit with a black book in her mitt. She’s talking to people as she moves in and out of the crowd. She’s very close now. I can hear what she’s saying. She’s showing people her badge in the black book and saying who she is and asking if anybody knows who phoned in the call to report the shooting. She’s also asking did anybody see anything, notice anything, hear anything?
Her name is Detective Sergeant Marilyn Kennedy. She’s taller than my mom and about as tall as I am. She has a beautiful soft face and huge blue eyes. She’s quiet-spoken and patient. But she seems strong at the same time. People pay attention when she speaks.
She’s right next to me now.
I’m looking in her eyes and I can’t look away when she asks the question. I want to look away but I can’t.
“I did,” I say quietly. “I called it in.”
Detective Kennedy leans her head in closer. I know she heard me but she wants me to talk even more quiet than quiet. Sometimes when people lean their head in, it’s because they want y
ou to talk louder. But sometimes it’s the opposite. This is the opposite.
“I called it in,” I whisper. “I saw somebody.”
For a second, the smoke of our breaths makes one cloud. One cloud and we are in it, face to face.
IV
Sometimes Dink’s dad acts like he’s going to choke to death. Dink’s dad is a cigarette junkie and when he gets a real good coughing fit going, I can’t help getting worried. Dink’s dad’s cough has three parts. The beginning of Dink’s dad’s cough is like a rifle shot. The middle part lasts so long that his face goes black and his eyes pour tears and his mouth stays wide open like a fish drowning in air. Then he doubles his body up and goes into the last part. It sounds a bit like somebody plunging a plugged toilet. All this time, he’s not breathing and you can’t help but get worried.
The three of us are watching a tape over at Dink’s. The tape is an episode of “The Day the Universe Changed” that Dink taped from the Learning Channel. It’s pretty interesting the way the guy shows you how building the pyramids in Ancient Egypt was the start of us flying to Mars and living in outer space.
Of course, Dink knows the whole thing off by heart. He’s seen it about fifty times. He has the whole series on tape.
I’m trying my best to listen to it but Dink’s dad is sitting with us and his coughing fits don’t make it any easier to hear the TV. I’ve got one eye on the TV and the other on him, if that’s possible.
He’s got his cigarette in between his first and second fingers. These two fingers are black. The rest of his smoking hand is brown.
His ashtray in front of him on the coffee table is full to the brim with butts. In fact, every ashtray in the house is full, overflowing.
Dink’s dad often has two cigarettes going at once. One in an ashtray, one in his fingers or in his mouth.
All the tables in the house have cigarette burns in them.
Also, on most of the tables in the house are bottles of health pills, vitamins and iron and stuff.
You see, Dink’s dad is a health nut!
In the middle of a really heavy coughing fit, he’s liable to say, “Never smoke, boys! Even though the price has gone down! It’s a filthy habit and it’ll kill ya!”
Then he’ll finish coughing, winding up staring at the floor as if he is checking to see if anything came up, like his heart, for instance!
Then he lights up another one and takes a big drag, sucking it in to get it right down as deep as he can into his body.
All around the house, Dink has put up a lot of anti-smoking posters, trying to get his dad to quit. Signs that say stuff like “It’ll kill ya!” and “Don’t be an idiot!” and “It will suck the life right out of you!” and pictures of half-dead-looking people who smoked for years and posters showing how much money it costs to smoke and a picture of a burnt-out lung they took out of a dead smoker and put on a table. It looks like an old shoe that was in a fire. Beside it is a picture of a nice pink lung.
I’m wondering where they got the nice pink lung. I guess from somebody who died of something else for a change.
Another poster is a picture of a revolver with the chamber open. Instead of bullets in the chamber, it’s cigarettes. There’s smoke coming out of the barrel.
The picture of the gun switches me to yesterday. Another channel.
Yesterday is back in front of me.
Especially the long look Detective Kennedy gives me when I say the four words, “I called it in.”
Who was it called this crime in?
“I called it in.” Then, “I saw somebody.”
Sometimes a few easy small words, words that everybody can understand, even a little kid, can change everything.
Last spring it was only two words, two simple words I said to a teacher, that got me kicked out of school and changed my life around forever.
Detective Kennedy looks at me for a long time inside our little cloud of breath-steam. Then her eyes dart one way, then the other way. She sees that nobody around has heard me say anything. She begins to move on to the next group of people in the crowd. She begins talking to them but she keeps her eyes on me. She puts her mitt out towards me, like she’s saying, Wait right there, son, don’t move, don’t say a word. Now she’s talking to two of the waiters from the Village Inn and the cook. Now her eyes move off me but her hand is still out towards me, holding me, telling me secretly that we’re together.
Now farther away.
Now I can’t see her.
Then, her face again, eyes on me, telling me something. Her face now is blocked out by somebody’s parka. Now her face is back, her eyes laser me through the crowd and she disappears again.
I don’t move.
Now I see her head looking over a police car, her head saying, Come here or Follow me by just tilting a bit. Come here, but don’t let anybody know, don’t show anybody, don’t reveal...she ducks in the car.
Soon the police car begins to move, slow through the frozen air and mist, and turns the corner onto Booth Street.
I walk easy, not going anywhere special, not being noticed, just strolling along away from a murder scene. If it wasn’t so cold, I’d whistle a little tune. I’d whistle my father’s song, “Hanging Gardens,” that he composed, that he played so beautiful on his trombone.
I walk past the laneway man shoveling his laneway, even though it’s already been shoveled. He doesn’t look up.
He never looks up. He shovels his laneway right to the pavement. There’s never a flake in his laneway. He cuts the edges of the snowbank so even and square they look like they’re cut out of white marble. He cuts the snowbank along the curb like he was a surveyor or an architect. He has five or six different-sized shovels and scoops. If anybody walks up his laneway and leaves snow prints, he’s right behind them with his broom and a dustpan to keep his laneway perfect. Sometimes, on a very mild day, a day when the snow will melt almost right after it hits the ground, the laneway man will shovel it first. Get it quick, before it melts! The laneway man waits in his laneway, leaning on his shovel. If a flake falls, he follows it, picking it out of the air if he can.
When the plow comes by, the laneway man is ready with his shovel. He leans over, holding his shovel, and waits, like a hockey player waits for the referee to drop the puck.
The laneway man never pays attention to anything except his laneway.
If a dinosaur came ripping up Anderson and stopped at the end of the laneway man’s laneway and screamed at him, the laneway man would not look up. He would keep shoveling.
All the time the crowd was piling up about three doors down from him, and the police sirens were howling and barking, and a dead man lay bleeding, the laneway man didn’t even look over, didn’t even glance up!
I’m like the laneway man.
I haven’t seen a thing.
I turn the corner.
Sure enough, there’s Detective Kennedy’s car, waiting, pumping frozen clouds around itself. Clouds of condensation that now hide me.
I get in the car.
“Smart boy,” says Detective Kennedy. “I didn’t want anybody to see us talking. You never know. The person you think you saw might be right around us somewhere, as we speak!”
My brain is suddenly on fast forward.
If that’s true, then when he finds out there’s a witness, he’ll know it’s me. He might come after me. Get me. Like Dumper Stubbs tried to do. Get rid of me before I can identify him. And what if he remembers me from the Hong Kong Beauty Salon? What if he saw that day, Connie Pan and me, laughing at him while he was drooling in the mirror over his hair? What if his memory puts both our faces in a picture that he can see any time he wants? Maybe Connie Pan knows the guy’s name! Where he lives, maybe. What if he tries to hurt Connie so she can’t identify him? What if he tries to get rid of her? What if he kills both of us?
Or, maybe he didn’t see me at all. Didn’t see me because of my brown coat up against the brown doors to my yard. Maybe he looked right through me. Maybe
he thinks there are no witnesses. But then, if they put my name in the paper again, maybe he’ll...
Or maybe he’s watching right now like Detective Kennedy says, and then if the paper comes out and says there’s a witness, he’ll know who it is. Come after me, after Connie Pan...
I don’t want to be a hero anymore.
I’ve got enough self-esteem...
I’m not telling you, Detective Marilyn Kennedy, not telling anybody...
Detective Kennedy
But you said you saw somebody.
Enough Self-Esteem Sweetgrass
I said I sawsomething.
D.K.
I heard you say somebody.
E.S.E.S.
Something. A brown van. Tinted windows.
D.K.
And a rifle?
E.S.E.S.
The barrel.
D.K.
And you didn’t see who was in the van?
E.S.E.S.
Tinted windows.
D.K.
License plate?
E.S.E.S.
Too much steam around, I guess. Condensation.
Clouds. Hard to see anything.
D.K.
You could see in the windows?
E.S.E.S.
Tinted windows, I told you.
D.K.
You said somebody. I heard you. You said you saw somebody!
E.S.E.S.
No, I didn’t. I said something. I saw the brown van. The gun coming out the hole in the back. I told you. That’s what I saw.
D.K.
You said you saw someone. Someone. One!
E.S.E.S.
I didn’t say that.
D.K.
Why are you changing your mind? What are you afraid of?
E.S.E.S.
I’m not changing my mind. I’m not afraid of anything!
She opens her big blue eyes so wide I almost fall in. Hard to lie to big eyes.
Detective Kennedy, relaxing now. Taking it easy.
D.K.
OK, Mr. Sweetgrass. You can get out of the car now. Sweetgrass. Nice name. Native?
E.S.E.S.
Abo. My father is, was, Ojibway. He’s dead now.