Boy O'Boy (2 page)

A streetcar goes by on Cobourg. One of the tall ones. With the long face. He says Cobourg Barns on his forehead. His eyes are the tall windows. His little round nose is the headlight. His mouth is the catcher. He’s not smiling. He never smiles.

“You must be Martin,” one of the ladies says.

The ladies have beautiful clothes on. They both have colored umbrellas but it’s not raining anymore. The sun is out and there’s steam coming off the streetcar tracks and parts of the sidewalk.

Sometimes the water truck comes along and washes the street. I like to sit on the curb and let the water spraying from the truck splash on my feet. But this steam is because of the rain, not the water truck.

The street smells clean.

Our step is broken in half. I’m sitting on the higher part. I have on socks and over the socks I’m wearing rubbers. I have no shoes. My rubbers are held on by elastics the same color as the socks and the rubbers. Black. My legs are white. Except for the scabs on my knees from falling on the road playing soccer with a tennis ball with Billy Batson. The scabs are brown and red. My short pants are brown. I have a pocket in the left side but there’s nothing in it. I have on a white undershirt. My sweater is wool and the color is gray. It’s getting hot so I’ll take it off but I can’t right now because these two ladies are here now, looking down at me.

The cuffs of my sweater are coming apart. The threads of wool are hanging down. With my fingers I pull up the threads and close my hands around them so the ladies can’t see. I look like I have no hands.

The ladies squeeze up their faces when the streetcar goes by. They can feel the rumbling of the streetcar up through their fancy shiny shoes and up their legs inside their dresses.

One of the ladies has some wrinkles around her mouth and loose skin on her neck like a turkey. And she has blue hair. A turkey with blue hair.

The other lady has hair the color of peaches piled up with curls and her cheeks are painted pink and her eyelashes are long and black and her eyes are like blueberries and her lips are painted with heavy thick lipstick the color of ketchup.

The turkey lady has a watch hanging on her chest beside her glasses hanging there too. I can tell the time on the watch even though it’s upside down.

It’s a quarter after eight.

“We’re very sorry to hear about your grandmother. She went to sleep last night, didn’t she?” the ketchup lady says in a sing-songy voice.

“She didn’t go to sleep,” I say. “She died.”

“Ah, yes, that’s it, Martin, isn’t it?” says the turkey lady. I’m being impudent and I know it.

Our door opens and my cat, Cheap, gets pushed out to sit beside me.

“Oh, what an interesting cat!” says the ketchup lady. “What’s it’s name?”

“Cheap,” I say. “I got him for my birthday last year. My father bought him at Radmore’s pet shop on Rideau Street for ten cents because of his missing ear. Cheap.”

“Oh,” says the ketchup lady. She’s smiling but she doesn’t want to.

“Are those your shoes?” says the turkey lady.

“They’re not shoes, they’re rubbers,” I say.

“Where did you get all that lovely curly hair?” says the ketchup lady.

“Where’d you get your hair?” I say. Impudent.

My granny would say, “Dinna be impudent.”

“How old are you?” says the turkey lady.

They always ask you how old you are. But you’re not allowed to ask them how old they are.

I don’t tell her. She goes into her purse and takes out a paper and unfolds it.

“Did you draw this? Martin? In school? Mmm?”

A beautiful lady stabbing a ghoul is the picture. “EEEEEE!”

T
HE FAMILY allowance check came today. I saw the mailman come and give it to my mother not too long after the turkey lady and the ketchup lady left the house.

My mother got Phil ready and walked up to the bank on Rideau Street to cash the check. Each month we get sixteen dollars. Eight dollars for each kid in the family.

Phil gets the same as me even though he’s not the same as me.

I’m trying to figure out how much money Horseball Laflamme’s mother gets from the mailman. They have so many kids she must get lots of money. They all live next door to us at number one Papineau. There’s something wrong with Horseball’s father, Mr. Laflamme. He coughs a lot at night. You can hear him through our bedroom wall upstairs. Coughing and hacking and spitting.

We live at number three Papineau.

Next door to us at number five is Buz Sawyer and his mother. Buz’s father is dead. Buz joined the air force and went away last winter. Mrs. Sawyer said he lied about how old he was so he could go and fly planes. Mrs. Sawyer was mad about that. We’re waiting for Buz to come back soon. Then, next to Buz is number seven where my friend Billy Batson lives with his mother. His father is at the war.

At number nine, the last in the row, there’s Lenny Lipshitz and the Lipshitzes. Lenny’s father is a rag man. A rag and bone and junk man. He has a horse with a bent back that pulls an old creaky wagon. He drives around all day, really slow in the wagon. Every little while he calls out something that means rags, bones, junk. He sits up there on his wagon half full of bedsprings and bottles and paper and bones and he’s not sitting up straight. He looks like he’s asleep.

Lenny Lipshitz has a face that makes you think he’s lying all the time. I guess it’s because he never looks right at you when he says something to you. He always looks away over your shoulder or down at your shoes when he talks. And his mouth acts funny when it tries to say the words. His mouth acts like it doesn’t want to say the words it’s saying.

And his cheeks go up a bit like your cheeks do when you stub your toe or you get your fingers caught in a door.

One day, at school, Lenny showed me a game called pennies in the pot. You dig a hole with your heel in the dirt. That’s the pot. Then from three long steps away you each throw a penny and try to get it in or near the pot. Whoever is in, or closest, gets a turn shoving the other penny with his finger. If he gets it in he keeps both pennies. If he doesn’t, it’s the other guy’s turn.

We played quite a while and I lost every time.

I was starting to run out of pennies when along came Miss Gilhooly, our art teacher. She was HORRIFIED and said that what we were doing was gambling and that gambling was evil and that we should give all the money back and get off the path of sin and wrong.

In my pocket I had three cents left.

“How much did you have before you started this GAMBLING?” Miss Gilhooly said. She had a look of great sadness on her face. She was looking at me like I was someone who just got a horrible disease and was going to get sent to a leper colony or to the Island of the Damned, like in the comics. I showed her the three cents I had left.

I looked straight into her eyes and said I had twenty cents when we started.

“Then Lenny,” she said, “you’ll give Martin back seventeen cents and never, never GAMBLE again!”

“But,” Lenny said, “it wasn’t seventeen cents, it was only ten cents. I won only ten cents from him!”

Lenny was looking down at Miss Gilhooly’s big shoes and then up over her shoulder at the Union Jack flying over York Street School and his mouth was acting funny and his face was in pain.

“You’re lying, Lenny,” Miss Gilhooly said very quietly. “Now, you’ll give Martin back his seventeen cents immediately or we go to the principal.”

Of course, Lenny didn’t want to go to the principal and get tortured and maybe executed so he gave over the seventeen cents.

On my way home going past Provost’s candy store I remembered something awful.

That morning I had two dimes that I found in the gutter just outside our house and I spent seven cents of it on a big Crispy Crunch chocolate bar and got a toothache for a while chewing away on the whole thing on my way to school.

So I really had only thirteen cents when I started GAMBLING.

Lennie was not lying. I was the liar.

I told my granny about it. She told me I have the kind of beautiful face that people will always want to believe. People want to believe what a beautiful face says.

And nobody will ever want to believe what Lenny Lipshitz says.

“Does that mean I always have to tell the truth?” I asked my granny.

“Yes,” she said. “Telling the truth is best.”

Then she said that I was a beautiful, beautiful boy and I’d have to learn to live with that the rest of my born days.

While I’m waiting for my mother and Phil to come back from the bank, I’m looking through my pile of
National Geographic
magazines — the ones that my granny used to bring over when she was finished reading them.

My favorite is the one about the Aztecs, the Nahuatl people of Mexico long, long ago. The Aztecs, every spring, would take the most beautiful boy of the tribe and give him presents and wonderful food and expensive clothes and money and parties with beautiful girls and music and rub him with oil and give him a crown and have a big parade for him and then at the end of it they would stretch his beautiful naked body across a golden altar and the priests would hold him down stretched out on his back as far as they could stretch him while everybody watched and prayed and with a silver knife they would cut out his heart and lift it up to give to the gods. So the crops would grow.

There was a colored painting of the altar and the Aztec priests cutting out the heart of the beautiful boy.

The knife and the blood.

M
Y MOTHER and Phil are back from the bank. Phil is howling and acting up. My mother gives me a whole dollar.

“Go up to Lefebvre’s Shoe Market and get yourself a pair of running boots. They’re ninety-nine cents. You can keep the cent left over. Those two women, two officials from the Assistance, seem to think you’re not being brought up right. Neglected. You’d think they’d have the common decency to wait at least till after the funeral to come and load this on me. Bunch of busybodies.”

My mother sits on the chesterfield. She’s tired and her eyes are red. She’s sitting on the part where there’s no spring sticking up through.

There’s a baby in her belly that’s going to come out soon.

I walk up Cobourg Street past Heney Park on my way to sing in the Protestant choir. Billy Batson is with me. We’re both supposed to be the summer boys in the choir. We take the places of some of the regular boys who go away from Lowertown all summer to their uncles’ farms or to their shacks and cabins along the rivers.

Were supposed to be Mr. Skippy Skidmore’s summer boys.

Mr. Skippy Skidmore is our music teacher and choir master at York Street School. While I was singing in the school choir Mr. Skippy came right over and stood beside me and put his hands in my curly hair and put his ear down close to my mouth and listened to just me while practically the whole school was singing in the gym. We were singing “God Save the King” or some song like that.

Billy said Mr. Skippy did the same to him.

Billy Batson makes me laugh. He has the same name as the boy in the comic books who can change into Captain Marvel.

In the comics, a homeless orphan called Billy Batson meets a wizard who gives him a magic word to say. The word is SHAZAM!

S is for Solomon equals wisdom

H is for Hercules equals strength

A is for Atlas equals stamina

Z is for Zeus equals power and leadership

A is for Achilles equals courage

and

M is for Mercury equals speed.

The homeless orphan Billy Batson says SHAZAM! and then there’s a picture that says BOOM! and Billy changes into Captain Marvel who looks a lot like Fred MacMurray, the movie star, except for his clothes. Captain Marvel has a tight red suit on with a yellow belt, yellow cuffs, yellow boots and a white cape with yellow trim.

And on his chest is a yellow lightning bolt.

When my friend Billy sees danger or needs help or is afraid or wants to help somebody in trouble or gets into a fight on Angel Square on the way to school or gets excited about something he says the word SHAZAM! and shuts his eyes and waits.

Of course, nothing happens. Nothing goes BOOM! and he doesn’t change into Captain Marvel, but he says the word gives him supernatural powers and makes his brain swell up like Captain Marvel’s chest.

We walk up Cobourg Street past Heney Park where last winter the little boy got run over by a coal truck after he slid on his cardboard sleigh down off the hill onto Clarence Street.

Then we stop to look in Radmore’s pet shop window, the filthy window on Rideau Street, at the kittens and puppies and rabbits in there. This is where they got Cheap, my cat, last year for my birthday.

I am thinking about how, after Mr. Skippy listened to my voice and choir was over and I went to math class, our math teacher, Ketchy Balls, gave me a piece of paper with a note written that said I was supposed to come to St. Albans Church when the summer holidays started and sing in the choir there. The note was from Mr. S. Skidmore. Did the S. stand for Skippy?

After Ketchy Balls gave me the note he hit me on the legs with his secret stick.

He keeps a stick shoved up the sleeve of his coat. If a boy (never a girl) is doing something else instead of doing his math work, Ketchy Balls reaches into his secret sleeve and whips out the stick and stings him across the bare legs with it.

While I was trying to read the note (Mr. Skippy wasn’t a very good writer), Ketchy Balls whipped out his stick and cut a red mark on my leg.

“You’re supposed to be working on your math work right now, not reading notes from people!” said Ketchy Balls.

Everybody hates Ketchy Balls. One day last winter Killer Bodnoff hit him on the back of the head with an ice ball and knocked his hat off at recess. That afternoon Ketchy Balls tried to find out who did it but nobody would tell so all the boys in the room got the strap. What a man Ketchy Balls is.

Billy and me, we walk down Rideau Street past Imbro’s Restaurant where everybody’s in there munching on spaghetti and meat sauce and licking up delicious ice cream sundaes.