Boy O'Boy (6 page)

E.A.Bourque ICE/GLACE is one block away on St. Andrew. I can smell the wet sawdust from here.

I love it in the cool dark ice house.

I drag my wagon in there. You go in the office first. You give the dime to the man and get your ticket. There’s always two men. They’re drinking beer and talking about the war. They wish they could’ve gone but maybe next time.

Outside the office deep in the ice house I give my ticket to the man there. His head reminds me of my father’s pisspot.

“Hi there, pretty boy,” he says to me. “Where didja get the shoes?”

“At Lefebvre’s Shoe Market,” I say.

“What’s wrong with them?” he says.

“Nothing’s wrong with them,” I say.

“They’re too long, aren’t they? Those feet, you look like a penguin.”

“And your head reminds me of my father’s pisspot,” I whisper.

“What’d you say?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“Pretty boy smart ass like you could get a slap in the ear!” he says and puts a block of ice on my wagon. Its smaller than it’s supposed to be.

“If you hurry home with that there might be some left when you get there! Smart ass pretty boy!”

I pull the wagon down St. Andrew and over to St. Patrick and here’s Billy come to meet me. He knows I always go for ice on this day. I’m trying to keep it in the shade. There’s already water dripping out of my wagon, leaving a trail.

“My father says you could maybe fry a fried egg on the sidewalk today,” I say to Billy. “It’s going to be so hot.” “My father used to say that all the time too,” says Billy. I look at Billy. I’m going to say it to him. I do say it to him.

“Mrs. Sawyer told my mother that that man last night was your father.”

Billy looks at me.

“SHAZAM!” Billy says. “Mrs. Sawyer tells lies.” “Who was that crazy man last night?”

“I don’t know. Just some crazy crazy man, I guess.”

There’s a guy on the veranda of his little house on St. Patrick Street next door to Petigorsky Shoe Repair. He’s got his dog. He pets the dog and he pets the dog and he rubs the dog’s stomach and rolls the dog and he loves the dog.

Billy can’t keep his eyes off the guy and his dog. They’re having so much fun together. They like each other so much.

Billy wishes he was that dog.

W
E’RE A LITTLE early, Billy and me, for choir.

Mr. George is taking five of us summer boys up to the choir loft to see the organ pipes. The room is up over the altar in the church where all the organ music comes from. There’s Billy and me and Dick Dork, Darce the Arse and Dumb Doug.

Billy named these summer boys. We don’t know what their real names are.

We go up a steep staircase in back of the altar.

Mr. George opens the door to the loft with a key and then I see him reach up and hang the key back on the nail. High up on the side of the door jamb.

“This is out of bounds, my summer boys,” says Mr. George. “Nobody’s allowed in this room unless they are with me. Is that clear?”

In the room there are rows of pipes standing straight up and down. At one end of the row they are as big and tall as stove pipes. At the other end as thin and short as little flutes. Each pipe has a wedged hole in it part way up like in a whistle. The top of each pipe is open. It has a sleeve that Mr. George can pull up or push down to make the pipe longer or shorter. That’s the way he tunes the organ. To make sure the notes are right. If he makes the pipe just a tiny bit longer, then that one note is a tiny bit lower. If he taps the sleeve on top and makes the pipe a little bit shorter, then the note that pipe makes is a little bit higher.

Each key on the organ downstairs near the altar is attached to one of these pipes.

The pipes that are as big as stovepipes are the low notes. The tiny pipes at the other end are the high notes.

There’s a step ladder here to change the tops of the big stovepipe notes, they’re so high.

“Now you boys wait here and don’t you dare touch anything! Just stand there and I’ll be right back,” says Mr. George. He goes out of the loft and shuts the door. Then the lights go out.

Soon Mr. George is down at the organ. You can see him sitting down there through the slats in the wall. Now tiny notes start coming out of the smallest pipes, the little whistles, lots of teeny, high notes running up and down like pretty water falls or teensy rain tinkling.

Now the bigger pipes start playing, like bugles and car horns and the factory whistle at the paper mill. And the noise in the nearly pitch dark room is starting to hurt our ears.

Now it gets louder, and the notes get lower now and the bigger pipes are blowing and sounding like bulls howling and trains whistling and I can see the shadows of the summer boys putting their hands over their ears. Now the biggest pipes start to pound and bellow and rumble like thunder and crash and roll and explode like earthquakes and volcanoes and the whole room is shaking and vibrating and shuddering and the low notes are coming up our legs and into our hearts and boiling into my brain until my whole body is shaking and I’m falling apart and the floor cracks open and the room comes tumbling down around us.

All of a sudden everything stops. The silence is ringing away.

I just stepped off a cliff into space.

The light goes on.

Mr. George opens the door.

“Wasn’t that fun, my summer boys? Now, let’s go down with Mr. Skippy and sing our brave little hearts out, shall we?”

A
T THE FRANÇAIS theater today there’s a big lineup to go and see
Double Indemnity
starring Billy’s favorite actor, Fred MacMurray. We’ve already seen it. Fred MacMurray is Billy’s favorite actor because he looks just like Captain Marvel. Or Captain Marvel looks like Fred MacMurray. Which is which?

“Captain Marvel has lived forever. He’s immortal,” says Billy. “So it must be that he came first. So you have to say that Fred MacMurray looks like Captain Marvel.”

“How did he do that?” I say. “How do you get to look like somebody like Captain Marvel?”

“I guess you have to really try hard,” says Billy.

Of course, Fred MacMurray doesn’t wear a red suit with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest and a white cape with yellow trim and yellow boots.

Fred in
Double Indemnity
wears a suit just like my father wears to go and work in the Silver Service. But he has big eyebrows and a square chin and hair the color of ink just like Captain Marvel.

In the movie, a woman with a long nose named Barbara Stanwyck gets Fred to murder her husband Edward G. Robinson. What a sucker Fred is.

Billy and me, we’ve got thirty cents. I have the quarter I got from Mr. George. Billy’s got the nickel Mr. George flipped to him for not getting caught and reaching the wall.

We need some more money.

We want to go to the White Tower restaurant and order two orders of French fried potato chips and two cherry Cokes and then go to the Rat Hole theater and get two large popcorns and two medium-sized Orange Crushes.

Here’s the money we need:

We go down the alley behind the Français theater and look up to see if the fire-escape door has got the stick in it to hold it open. It has.

I have a plan.

I have my fishing line and lead weight with me that I use for sneaking into the show without paying. I flip the weight up and around the iron ladder and we pull it down.

I go around to the front of the theater and walk up and down the lineup. Right away I’m lucky! There’s Dick Dork and Dumb Doug.

I tell them that instead of paying thirteen cents to get in to see
Double Indemnity
, I can get them in for ten cents. They give me their dimes and I take them around the back and tell them to wait there with Billy until I find two more.

It doesn’t take long.

It’s easy to find two kids who want to save three cents each. Six cents can buy you some nice chocolate-covered raisins. I get their dimes.

Around the back I explain to them that they all have to go in together. I tell them they have to crawl in and stay low and roll into the aisle. I tell them about the curtain. How you have to grab the bottom of it.

“If you don’t hold the curtain,” I say, “it will blow and light will come in and the ushers will come, and you’ll get slapped around and then they’ll throw you out.”

The kids are looking scared. Scared and excited.

Up they go.

When they reach the landing, we let the ladder go and it rises up out of reach.

“Do you think they’ll make it?” Billy says.

“If they do as they’re told they will,” I say.

On the landing, they’re crouched together. It looks like they are trying to decide who’s going in first. Looks like they’ve picked Dumb Doug because he’s the biggest.

Instead of crawling in like I told him, Dumb Doug grabs the door, opens it wide and walks in. The other three walk in behind him.

Billy and me, we round the corner and hide and peek. Sure enough, very soon an usher sticks his head out the fire-escape door and looks around. Then the door shuts. No stick to hold it open for some fresh air.

Today’s going to be extra hot in the Français theater, for sure. And stinking. All the perfume and smelly feet and cigarettes and farts and stale popcorn.

We go around the front and cross the street and watch the ushers come out dragging the four kids by their shirts. Kicked out.

We walk up Dalhoozie and go into the White Tower restaurant. The White Tower is not a tower. It’s just a small little square building with a fake castle turret on each corner. The roof is so low Buz Sawyer could probably reach up and put his hand on it.

Inside there are five red stools at the counter.

The French fried potatoes smell delicious, specially with the vinegar and the salt. We can’t get cherry Cokes, because we’re two cents short. Ordinary Cokes will do.

“I feel sort of bad,” says Billy. “That they got caught.”

I don’t say anything.

“Do you feel bad?” says Billy.

I look right at him. Should I, Granny? Look at this face and believe what I say.

“No, I don’t feel bad,” I lie. “Serves them right. They didn’t do what they were told.”

We walk up past the Union Station and the Chateau Laurier. There’s a small parade with drums and a trombone and some soldiers who just came home from the war that is almost over.

There are kids riding the iron horses of the War Memorial.

On Sparks Street there’s a big fight in front of Bowie’s Lunch. There are soldiers rolling on the ground and police and girls screaming. The big window of Bowie s Lunch is crashed in and there’s glass all over Sparks Street. There are people still sitting in the restaurant eating mashed potatoes and talking about the fight.

There’s a sailor kissing a girl near the shattered window. Further up Sparks Street I see my father. He’s going into the Household Finance Company. He doesn’t see me. My mother and father fight all the time about the Household Finance Company.

There’s a part of the Ottawa
Journal
on the sidewalk on Bank Street. I pick it up and start to read what’s written there. I have to. I can’t help it.

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! When it is 90 degrees in the shade where you are there is a place only six miles away that is 60 degrees below zero! Where is it?

"Banana skins fried in cold cream taste something like

French fried potatoes!” (says prisoner of war for 3 years)

Will the earth blow up? Atomic war next?

The human body has 206 bones and 696 muscles

Page turner for organist wanted

Soldiers met at Lansdowne Park

The Rat Hole theater on Bank Street is really the Rialto theater but everybody calls it the Rat Hole because they say when you sit there in the dark you can feel the rats jumping around your ankles fighting for the popcorn and candy on the floor down there.

Three Alan Ladd movies today for ten cents!

What a bargain!

Billy and me, we present a little toast to Mr. George with our Orange Crushes. There is no clink when our glasses touch for the toast because our glasses are made of paper.

Not like in the movies.

Alan Ladd is up there on the screen.

Right away the screen goes brown and Alan Ladd disappears and soon we can smell smoke and the lights go on and everybody’s yelling and a man comes out on the stage in front of the screen and tells us there’ll only be
two
Alan Ladd movies instead of three because one of them just burned up in the projection room and that’s that and if anybody wants their money back well, too bad, you’re not getting it back and now here’s two really good Alan Ladd movies coming up so enjoy yourselves or go to hell home, he doesn’t care one way or another…

In the movie
The Glass Key
Alan Ladd wears a long coat with wide shoulders and a hat like my father’s hat. He almost never takes off the hat and coat.

He has his hat off once when he’s half dead in the hospital bed. And once he has his hat
and
coat off when the bad guy, William Bendix, is throwing him up against the wall like a rubber ball and another time when two other bad guys try to drown him in a tub of ice water.

William Bendix puts a whole onion in a sandwich and stuffs it in his mouth all at once he’s such a pig and meanwhile Alan Ladd sets fire to a mattress he’s tied to and crashes out a window and down through a glass skylight and escapes. His face is a mess but the next day in the hospital Veronica Lake comes in with her hair falling down over her eye and Alan Ladd is his handsome old self again and you can tell by the music and the way her curly lips are about two stories high on the screen that she wants to kiss him more than anything else in the world. “SHAZAM!” whispers Billy.