Boy O'Boy (7 page)

I’m thinking about a girl I remember at York Street School, Geranium Mayburger, who had her very own picture of Alan Ladd in a frame with glass her mother bought her for her birthday at Woolworth’s on Rideau. Geranium had the picture on her desk and was kissing it when the teacher, Mr. Blue Cheeks, was telling us the history of the war and he saw her and everything went quiet for a while and then he turned purple and grabbed it from her and smashed it into the wastebasket.

In the other movie,
This Gun for Hire,
Alan Ladd is a nice bad guy who gets up in the morning with all his clothes on, gives his little kitten some milk in a saucer and then shoots a guy and also the guy’s secretary who is trying to make him a cup of coffee.

Veronica Lake does magic tricks while she’s singing to old drunks sitting at tables. Alan Ladd gets on a train with Veronica Lake who’s a spy for the war.

Veronica gets a twisted ankle and her hair falls over her right eye and her mouth gets quite curly. A fat guy who eats peppermints all the time is a traitor and the cops come and gun down Alan Ladd who can’t sleep because his cat died.

Veronica Lake says, “You saved my life,” and Alan Ladd, even though he’s dead, says, “Thanks!” for some reason and that’s the end.

We walk up Sparks Street past the Bowie’s Lunch smashed window. There’s a big board covering the window and all the broken glass is gone. Down the street the Salvation Army is playing some music. Near the War Memorial somebody’s making a speech and there’s lots of soldiers and girls around.

Up Rideau Street Billy goes into the public library and I go on ahead home. I look in Imbro’s Restaurant window at some people eating ice cream sundaes. If I had any money left I’d buy one. Maybe Mr. George tonight at choir will give me another quarter.

He seems to be a nice man.

What he did with the choir cat and his cape.

How he cut the cape so the cat wouldn’t have to wake up.

E
VERYBODY’S EXCITED. Horseballs mother won an electric stove. Worth two hundred dollars! At the Monster Bingo last night. It only cost her fifty cents to play twenty-one games. Fifty cents for a brand new shiny stove!

The stove is on the sidewalk in front of Laflamme’s. Everybody’s crowded around looking at it, feeling it. It’s so shiny and white. It’s a Westinghouse — the best kind, somebody says.

Horseballs mother can’t stop telling everybody about the bingo. How hot it was there at the Auditorium. How they had big fans blowing air over blocks of ice to cool off the bingo players so they wouldn’t sweat so much all over the bingo cards and have the cards always sticking to their arms.

Some of Horseballs sisters pretend they’re cooking stuff on the stove.

“I’ll cook the supper!” “No, I’ll cook the supper!” “No, I will!”

They’re shoving each other out of the way.

Now Horseball s father and some of the brothers lift up the stove and take it into the house.

“Careful now!” says Mrs. Laflamme, “Careful you don’t scratch the new stove on the door frame. Careful!” Horseball’s father and his brothers bang the brand-new stove three times on the doorway on the way in. Everybody’s yelling and pushing. They’re trying to be the first back in the house after the stove. Some of the small Laflammes climb in the front window. Some are already in the house. They lean out the upstairs windows and shout about the stove and wrestle.

Horseball dumps a pot of water on everybody from the window. There’s a big argument about who did it. Everybody’s shouting and laughing and running around.

Soon they’ll all be back in the house. I could get in line and live with them. Pretend I’m one of the Laflammes.

Back in my house there’s torn pages of magazines all over the floor. Phil loves to rip paper. My father says that’s how Phil reads. “Tonight,” my father often says, “maybe I’ll get to read the paper before Phil does!”

My mother’s in the kitchen doing the washing. Phil’s diapers are going through the wringer. The wringer is like a strange underwater animal with rollers for lips that eat wet cloth. The rollers pull the diapers through, roll the cloth through the tight lips and squeeze out the water.

What it would be like to get your hand caught in there? Pull your arm right in. Wring out your arm.

The diapers fall into a tub and then I take the tub out the back and hang Phil’s diapers on the clothesline to dry and to be put on him again.

My job.

The torn magazines are
National Geographies.

That my granny left for me.

At least he didn’t tear my two favorite ones — the one about the beautiful Aztec boy and the one about the trap door spider that scares me so much I start to shake.

Outside, Mr. Lipshitz is there with his wagon. Some of the Laflamme boys bring out their old electric stove and throw it up into his wagon. The wagon sags a bit and the old horse jumps and says something.

Mr. Lipshitz counts some change out of his little black purse.

I call on Billy but he’s gone ahead.

I cross Angel Square to go to choir this time. So I can see some of the lacrosse game.

In the winter on Angel Square there are always fights. But not in the summer. There’s no school in the summer.

There’s a pretty big crowd at the lacrosse game. There are two good players that everybody cheers for. One of them is the smallest on the field. The other one is the biggest. The small one is a little Pea Soup they call Sixpouce. Sixpouce means six inches. Whenever Sixpouce gets the ball in his stick everybody goes wild cheering. Sixpouce is as quick and tricky as a chipmunk.

The biggest player is a big Dogan they call Goliath. Whenever Goliath gets the ball in his stick everybody says, “Oooooo,” and, “Oh no, it’s Goliath, run for your lives!”

I’m standing beside a family. There’s the father and the mother and the two boys — two brothers. The mother’s belly is high like my mother’s. There’s another brother or sister in there waiting to come out and be in the family.

One of the brothers, the older one, is cheering for Sixpouce. The younger brother is cheering for Goliath.

“Come on, Goliath!”

“Come on, Sixpouce!”

Now Sixpouce has the ball in his stick. He runs toward Goliath. Goliath is going to knock him silly and take the ball from him.

Then Sixpouce does something that makes everybody gasp! He ducks and runs right between Goliath’s legs and escapes and scores!

The two brothers look at each other. They can’t believe it.

The crowd is going wild.

The brothers pretend they are Goliath and Sixpouce.

The younger one crawls between the older one’s legs. Their mother and father look at them and laugh. The father laughs and leans and ruffles the boys, hugs the boys. Maybe I could go and live with them.

I often feel like this. Wanting, wondering what it would be like to live in someone else’s house.

I leave the game and walk up York Street to King Edward Avenue and up to choir.

I go down the dark stairs to the choir chamber. I hang on to the round wooden railing. It is smooth and larger than my hand. I’m not late so I don’t need to skip step number nine.

Just on time.

“Ah!” says Mr. Skippy. “Look, Mr. George, who has arrived to make our ensemble complete! Shall we begin, Mr. George?”

We start choir practice.

Mr. George is playing the piano. Mr. Skippy is listening to us singing. Especially his summer boys. Dick Dork and Dumb Doug won’t look at me. They don’t know that Billy and I know they got caught by the ushers. They won’t say anything about it.

They’re too ashamed.

Mr. Skippy is paying attention, listening to me singing. He stops the choir. He’s bent over me.

“Rest, Mr. George,” he tells Mr. George. “Rest. We have a little tidying up here to do, don’t we?”

He’s looking at me. Mr. George winks at me. His thick glasses make the wink look like many winks.

“Now,” says Mr. Skippy, “do we have a new style of singing here by one of our summer boys? Holding the note longer than is written? O, God our help in
aaaaages
past?”

Mr. George plays it. Making fun. Winking.

“Are we being influenced by some popular trend, Mr. Martin O’Boy?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, let’s see now, Mr. O’Boy. Who is your favorite singer on the radio?”

“Bing Crosby,” I say. “I like ‘Moonlight Becomes You.’”

“Aha! Bing Crosby! That’s it! That’s exactly the way Bing Crosby would sing ‘Our help in
aaaaages
past,’ dragging the note. Bing Crosby is a crooner, Mr. Martin O’Boy. He’s not singing hymns in Mr. Skippy’s church choir now, is he? Now that’s enough Bing Crosby. No more Bing Crosby. Shall we continue, Mr. George?”

After choir Mr. Skippy says stay for a few minutes with Mr. George to help get rid of this Bing Crosby habit before it’s too late. A bad habit. This Bing Crosby.

Mr. George is at the piano. We practice a few verses while everybody’s piling out and going home.

Mr. George says my notes are pure. He says my voice is beautiful. I sound as clean as an icicle. As pure as a drop of spring water. Like a beautiful statue of an angel. A drop of quicksilver. A voice from heaven. Like an ice cream sundae.

Everybody’s gone now. Except Mr. George and me.

Mr. George gives me a hug in the empty choir room.

He’s becoming very fond of me.

“I’m becoming very fond of you, you know that, Martin O’Boy?” says Mr. George.

Mr. Skippy is peeking in the room. Now he comes in. He saw Mr. George give me the hug. He heard him say that he was becoming very fond of me.

“All right, Mr. George,” says Mr. Skippy. “That’s enough. Time for young summer boys to be going home to their mothers. Remember, Mr. George, we are responsible for these boys. No harm must come to them. We’ve spoken of this before, haven’t we? Now, run along, Martin O’Boy. Goodnight now.”

Before I go through the door I look back. They are both watching me go out.

I make step number nine squeak but I wait back on the landing and try to listen.

Mr. Skippy is talking. His voice is serious. It has a warning in it. He sounds like he’s scolding Mr. George. It’s not an argument though.

Mr. George isn’t saying anything.

I go up and out.

P
HIL IS asleep.

Lots of Horseball Laflamme’s family are snoring through the wall. Mr. Laflamme is coughing.

It’s quiet next door at Mrs. Sawyer’s. You never hear anything from there. Before Buz went to fly planes in the war there used to be lots of noise from there. Mr. Sawyer always had lots of visitors over and there’d be singing and laughing. And Mr. Sawyer had an accordion and sometimes he’d play it and you’d hear people dancing.

But then he got sick and died in the hospital.

And Buz always had lots of friends coming over to visit him. Buz was friends with everybody. Even us kids. He’d make lemonade sometimes and we’d all play cards and he’d turn up the radio really loud when there was music on like Don Messer’s Islanders or Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye.

And once Buz took Billy and me and some other kids up to Lindsay’s record store on Sparks Street and we played on records in the little booths there where you could pretend you were going to buy one of the records until they kicked you out.

And once a friend of his from Sandy Hill came over in his convertible car with the top down and Buz got me and Billy and a bunch of other kids and some Laflammes to pile in and we went for a drive all the way out to Britannia and we all went swimming.

And once we got to go with him and his friends to the Auditorium to see the wrestling.

Yvon Robert vs The Mask.

Yvon Robert ripped off The Mask’s mask and tried to make him eat it and then The Mask threw Yvon Robert out of the ring and then jumped down and hit him over the head with a chair and the crowd was going wild and Yvon Robert chased The Mask up the aisle where there was a guy selling hot dogs and The Mask knocked down the hot dog guy and stole a big bowl of mustard off his tray and poured mustard all over Yvon Robert’s head and then they got back in the ring and Yvon picked up The Mask’s mask and choked The Mask with it until he fainted and Yvon Robert was still the champion.

Later that night, after the wrestling, we saw Yvon Robert and The Mask walking together down Argyle Avenue and laughing.

And once, Buz fixed a tough guy from New Edinburgh named Tomato. His real name wasn’t Tomato. His real name was Percy Kelso. Buz told us all about him. His nickname was Tomato because his face was so red.

And he had a lisp. Buz told us that when he and Tomato were kids everybody teased Tomato by calling him Perthy Keltho. “Hey, Perthy Keltho, you got a head like a tomato!”

But when he got older he got real tough for some reason and everybody was afraid of him. Afraid of what he would do to them.

Once, Buz told us, Tomato picked a guy he didn’t like off Angel Square and stuffed him in somebody’s garbage can and rolled him up Clarence Street and then dumped him in Mr. Lipshitz’s wagon as he was passing by.

But Buz was friends with Tomato because once he had a big wooden sliver in his hand and it was starting to swell up and Buz pulled it out with a pair of pliers.

Last winter Billy Batson did a very stupid thing. We were going over to Rogers’ Drug Store across the St. Patrick Street bridge to New Edinburgh and there was Percy Kelso on the bridge looking down at the ice floating there. On our way by Percy, Billy said really quiet under his breath, “Hello, Mithter Tomato,” but Percy heard what Billy said and turned around and reached out as quick as lightning and grabbed Billy and turned him upside down and was holding him by his ankles over the icy Rideau River when along came Buz — lucky for Billy.

Buz talked to Tomato and Tomato put Billy back safe on the bridge and then Buz made Billy and me apologize to
Mister Kelso
— made us say to Tomato (Mr. Kelso) good luck and good health and thank you for allowing us to come over to New Edinburgh and if you ever need any messages delivered or errands run we’d be glad to do it no charge for you, Mister Kelso…