The Blue Helmet Page 3

  The Lakeshore Pharmacy occupied the corner of Lakeshore Boulevard and 17th Street, a block east of the restaurant. I knocked at the back door off the alley that ran behind the buildings fronting Lakeshore Boulevard. Andrea Gauthier was a small, good-looking woman with brown eyes and long chestnut hair. She came into the café once in a while. I handed her the bag, warm and aromatic from the hot coffee and muffins inside.

  “Thanks, Lee,” she said, placing the package on a table surrounded by cartons and shelves packed with overstock.

  “No sweat,” I replied, turning to go.

  “Um, Lee, do you have a minute?”

  The door hissed shut. “Sure.”

  Andrea sat down and opened the bag, pried the lid off the coffee, and took a sip, letting out a contented sigh. She dug for a muffin. “Reena says you’re doing take-out on wheels now.”

  “Yeah, just started last week.”

  “I was wondering, would you be interested in making the odd delivery for us? I’d clear it with Reena first, of course,” she said around a mouthful of muffin when she saw me hesitate. “I could pay you up front each time. We have an account system for our regulars—you know, the shut-ins and so on, so you wouldn’t have to keep track of any money. What do you say?”

  I couldn’t explain to her why I hesitated, could hardly put it into words for myself. I wasn’t used to people relying on me. The other day Abe Krantz had invited me into his home, given me a tip, trusted me to leave and lock the door behind me. It’s okay to be depended on, but it’s also another chance to screw up.

  Andrea had small, even teeth and full lips, and when she smiled the corners of her eyes turned up a fraction.

  “Sure,” I said. “Any time.” I didn’t tell her that I would have couriered for her for free.

  “Well, how about this afternoon? I have a prescription for a guy over on 13th Street. He, er, doesn’t get out much.”

  “One of the shut-ins?”

  “More of a stay-in. He’s a little, well, unusual. Say, about two?” she added, without elaborating.

  “See you then,” I said.

  Bruce Cutter lived in a brick two-storey north of Morrison Street. I pushed the tank up the buckled sidewalk and dragged it onto the verandah. A waist-high metal box, with MAIL painted in white on a blue background, sat beside the door, a big padlock on the hasp. As I reached into the pannier for the pharmacy bag, I noticed that the drapes on the bow windows were closed. Little metal disks suspended on irregular lengths of black thread seemed to float behind the glass. I looked closer. The disks had been cut from the bottoms of cans.

  Wondering what kind of eccentric lived in such a gloomy house, I thumbed the doorbell and waited, hefting the bag. This guy was either a hypochondriac or really sick, judging from the four fat pill containers inside. I pushed the button again. Andrea had said that Cutter hardly ever left the place. I tried knocking.

  A hollow metallic voice commanded me to “Step back from the door.”

  I took a pace backward. A video camera, painted the same colour as the door trim, pointed its single eye at me. Beside it was a speaker grille.

  “What do you want?” the voice demanded.

  I held up the pharmacy bag. “Lakeshore Pharmacy,” I said.

  There was a long pause. “How do I know for sure?”

  “Because I’m standing on your verandah with a bag full of pills that Andrea asked me to drop off. If you want, I’ll just leave it here by the door.”

  “Enter.” I heard a lock release.

  I stepped into a dark vestibule, and the door closed behind me with a thunk. A little panel in the door before me slid aside for a moment, then slipped back in place. I heard a variety of metallic clunks and clicks—more locks being disengaged, I guessed—then the door opened slowly to reveal a tall, stooped man in an open bathrobe, wrinkled pajamas, and ratty slippers.

  Cutter looked to be in his thirties. He was pale, unshaven, and gave off a sour odour. Coloured racing cars dashed around the legs of his pajamas.

  I held out the bag, ready to leave quickly. But he wanted to shake hands. “Cutter,” he announced solemnly.

  His hand was cold. “Lee,” I said.

  He wiped his palm on his robe, as if I had contaminated him. “First or last?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Lee. First name or last?”

  “Oh, first. Lee Mercer. Drug squad,” I added.

  Cutter smiled. He had green eyes that burned with a strange fire, and freckles. The corner of his right eye twitched repeatedly. “Well, come on in.”

  Without taking his eyes off me, he backed into a large, dimly lit room. Shelves jammed tight with books covered the walls. Uneven stacks of files, magazines and books hid the tops of trestle tables. Three computers glowed from a long desk, flanked by printers, a scanner, other electronics, a stack of software manuals, and a chaos of CDS and DVDS. At one end of the desk, a cluster of small TV monitors perched on top of a bank of VCRS showed black-and-white images of locations outside the house. I recognized the tank leaning against the verandah railing. A row of filing cabinets lined a short hallway leading to a kitchen at the back.

  There was something about the house, besides the stale air and musty odour, that made me feel kind of trapped. Then I realized what it was. There was no natural light.

  “I’ll take that,” Cutter said, and I handed him the bag. He carried it through to the kitchen, tore it open, rummaged around for a moment, and came back with it.

  “Tell Andrea I put the empties inside,” he said.

  There were four pill containers in the bag, along with lids. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “She’s always after me to remember my meds,” he said, his eye half-winking rapidly. “If I don’t, I slide into Never-Never Land again. I start colouring outside the lines. Mixed metaphor. So I return the empties to prove I’ve been a good boy.”

  You could have dumped the pills down the toilet, too, I thought.

  “I have to get back to work, now,” Cutter said, pointing over his shoulder to the desk with his thumb.

  I turned to go, nearly tripping on a stack of books that wobbled and then collapsed, spewing across the rug.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “My fault. I pile my library books by the door so I don’t forget to take them back. A little trick to help my memory. The dope burns holes in it.” He got to his knees and rebuilt the tower. “The library’s only two blocks away, but I never seem to get over that way.”

  He looked up from where he was kneeling, in his bathrobe and pajamas, his eye flinching as if it had a mind of its own. He was like a kid, as if the world was too much for him.

  “I guess I could drop them off for you,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “Oh, no, you—” He seemed to catch himself. “Well … okay, er, thanks.”

  He got to his feet and walked back to the kitchen, returning with a supermarket bag. He put the books inside, and handed them over. I stepped into the vestibule.

  “Bye,” he said abruptly, and slammed the door. I heard the mechanical clicks and thumps of the locks.

  Before I mounted the tank, I took a look back at Cutter’s house. Afternoon sun glinted off the shiny disks in the upstairs windows. I rode the two blocks to the library and hauled the books inside. The man behind the counter told me they were all overdue. I owed three dollars in fines.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Later that day I walked under a threatening sky to Lakeshore Pharmacy. I passed between aisles jammed with dental floss, hair colouring, condoms and cold remedies to the high counter at the back. Andrea stood with a phone clamped between shoulder and ear, talking and punching keys on a computer, while her assistant, a skinny guy in a spotless lab coat, pushed pills off the edge of a plastic tray into a trough with a little spatula, mumbling to himself.

  I held up Cutter’s bag and Andrea nodded. I waited ‘til she got off the phone.

  “Come on back, Lee,” s
he said.

  I rounded the end of the counter and followed her through a door leading to the store room where I had met her earlier. She took the bag and solemnly examined the containers.

  “Thanks, Lee,” she finally said. “Everything go all right?”

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “Nothing, er, unusual?”

  I smiled. “How am I supposed to answer that?”

  Andrea laughed, her eyes crinkling. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “I could use a break. Been on my feet all morning.”

  I didn’t mind spending time with Andrea. She was attractive and smart and spoke to me like an equal, even though she was a university-educated pharmacist and I was your average screw-up and dropout. Besides, I was curious about Cutter.

  “Bruce is a sweetheart,” she began. “Sometimes, when he comes in to fill his prescriptions, he wants to talk. He goes on and on as if he’s trying to cram as many words into a moment as he can. But most of the time I can’t get a word out of him. He has some … mental problems.”

  “I figured,” I said.

  “A number of years ago, Bruce told me, he came down with appendicitis—this was before he moved into the neighbourhood. He never said where he was from. Anyway, the attack was so bad he was rushed to the hospital and the doctors operated. Bruce swears that, while they had him unconscious, they implanted a microchip in his brain. Not long after he returned home he began to receive signals beamed from Buffalo. He saw people who weren’t there and heard voices commanding him to do things he knew he shouldn’t do.”

  I laughed. “Buffalo?”

  Andrea frowned and looked displeased, then let out a giggle. “I know,” she said, struggling to regain a serious face. “It’s terrible, but funny at the same time. Anyway, he’s under psychiatric care. Unless he takes his medication, he’s delusional and paranoid. He goes right over the edge.”

  “Into Never-Never Land,” I put in.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s how he described it to me.”

  Andrea shook her head. “It’s such a shame. Bruce is brilliant. He’s—was—a software designer. He invented a computer game while he was at university. When he told me that, I didn’t believe him. You know. With all his other ramblings. But I looked up the game on the Net. He’s the author, all right. It’s still one of the most popular games on the market, even though it’s totally nonviolent. It emphasizes intelligence and quick wits. Every time it goes into another edition, Bruce gets higher royalties. He’s rich. Not that it does him any good. He has no family, no siblings, and his parents are dead. And he’s—”

  I finished her sentence. “—colouring outside the lines.”

  Andrea shrugged. “All over the page,” she said.

  SEVEN

  HAMILTON BAY ELEMENTARY WAS close to our apartment, in a neighbourhood of grimy streets and factories, and bullies grew as tough there as the weeds that choked the cracks in the schoolyard pavement. Being small for my age, I was the perfect target.

  Larry Wildfong was in grade eight, bigger than most, and mean. Somewhere along the line he had picked up the idea that he was clever. He and his crew hung around outside the schoolyard gate, blocking the sidewalk and forcing people to walk around them, smoking, hassling girls with dirty jokes or gestures. Every morning when I turned the corner onto Skene Street, a ball of fear in the pit of my stomach, I hoped that when I got to the gate they’d be preoccupied with someone else, or not in the mood to give me trouble that day.

  There was nowhere to go for help. The teachers didn’t have a clue what was going on under their noses, or didn’t know what to do about it, or didn’t care, which all amounted to the same thing. Besides, ratting on someone was something you just didn’t do. When I had complained to my father, his solution was to “stand up to them.” Exactly how I was supposed to stand up to four or five guys, all bigger and older than me and bursting with confidence, he didn’t say.

  One day not long after my mother’s funeral, I plodded to school, sad and confused by her death. In a strange way, the hollowness she had left behind was a powerful presence that my father and I stepped around and didn’t talk about. It was so strong and so real that it was almost physical, and it hurt, and it sapped away energy and eagerness, as if I was dragging an invisible weight behind me. That morning I was frightened because, since I had woken that morning, I couldn’t remember her face.

  When I thought of her I saw the funeral mask of a stranger, hair stiff and unnatural, skin tight and coated with powder, the not-asleep look of her closed eyes as she lay in her coffin. My mother had never used hairspray or makeup. I was terrified that, for the rest of my life, each time I thought of her I would see only the rigid face that wasn’t the real her.

  I heard the shouting even before I turned the corner. Wildfong and his gang were kicking a book back and forth like a deflated soccer ball while Sam Greenberg stood by, clutching his violin to his chest. I was relieved that they were preoccupied with Sam. Maybe I could slip by unnoticed. I walked faster, skirted the knot of bodies and flashing feet, and made for the gate.

  “Hey! There’s Mercer!” I heard. “Are you a Jew, too, Mercer?”

  A couple of guys, their feet scuffling on the pavement, left the game and cut me off. As the rest sauntered over and formed a circle around me, Sam snatched up his book and sprinted toward the school, his violin case banging against his leg as he ran.

  Larry pushed my chest. “Where do you think you’re going, runt?”

  I kept my eyes on the asphalt between my shoes, lips pressed together. I felt rather than heard someone move in behind me. A favourite trick of Wildfong’s bunch was to have Larry hold your attention while another guy knelt behind you. Then, with a shove, Wildfong would send you toppling back onto your head.

  I shuffled to the side, surprised that, for once, I wasn’t scared. Each time the pack had come after me in the past, I had stood head down, unwilling to look Wildfong in the eye. I had waited with my heart pounding, the inside of my head echoing unmouthed words, please, please, let me go, leave me alone.

  Now, the fear was absent. What could be greater than the dread I had carried with me since my father’s shout had roused me from bed that morning?

  “I’m talking to you, runt,” Wildfong snarled.

  And then something flared up inside me and, with my teeth clenched and my fists flying, I threw myself at him.

  Caught by surprise, Wildfong stumbled backwards and fell, with me on top of him. My fists connected a few times before the pack hauled me off Larry and began to kick and punch me, cursing and grunting with the effort. I rolled to the side, scrabbled to my feet, and launched myself at Wildfong again, hammering his chest a few times before he knocked me backwards with a punch to my face.

  “Hold the little bastard,” he hissed.

  The others grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms. As Wildfong stepped forward I aimed a kick at his crotch, missed, caught him in the knee. With a boxer’s combination, he slugged me in the face and stomach. The hands released me and I fell to my knees, gasping. Surrounded, I forced myself to stand, eyes on Wildfong.

  By this time a small crowd had gathered, but they stayed back, watching. “Fight, fight!” someone shouted, but the others didn’t take up the chant the way they normally would.

  I hurled myself at Wildfong again, swinging, my fists catching only air. He sidestepped, throwing out a leg, and I sprawled face first on the ground, hands forward to catch my fall. Laughter from the crowd. I got up once more, turned to face him. I spat blood, wiped my hands on my jeans to clear away the grit embedded in my palms.

  “Had enough, runt?” he said.

  This time I landed one on his chin before he counterpunched and put me on the ground again. I got up, swung, missed, spun like a drunken dancer, and fell. A few more laughs from the onlookers, weaker this time. Once more I hauled myself up, stood wobbling, gathering what little strength I had left.

  The guys in the pack began to sidle toward the
schoolyard gate, as if avoiding a vicious dog. No sneers on their faces, now. They looked almost embarrassed. “Stay down, you stupid prick,” one of them said, “or he’ll kill you.” But Wildfong, unsure of what to do, moved with them, backing up across the schoolyard like a crayfish, muttering “Quit it,” pushing me away or tripping me every time I made another pathetic rush at him, until one last kick in the gut put me down for good. I looked up to see Larry and his pack disappear behind the doors of the school just as Mrs. Laurier came around a corner of the building.

  Limping and bleeding, I made my way back home. Once inside the apartment, I tossed my clothes into the laundry and took a hot bath, sitting in the steam, working out a story to tell my father when he got home. Later, I explained that a bunch of guys I didn’t know had jumped me in the park near our apartment. He bought the lie, shaking his head and muttering as he examined my battered face, his eyes brimming with sadness, as if the beating had been his fault. I stood quietly, holding back my anger that he hadn’t been there to help me, that he was never there.

  That wasn’t my last fight, but no one bullied me again. Without planning it or even knowing what I had been doing, I had learned my lesson. You had to stand up to them. To everyone. No matter what the odds, never show weakness, always be willing to take them on, never give in. They had to know that it would cost them something, even if they won.

  EIGHT

  YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO know anything about the restaurant business to see that Reena was never going to make a lot of money. She opened three times a day, with periods in between when the doors were locked. The morning shift offered coffee, muffins and toast and donuts, fried egg sandwiches and omelettes. Lunch meant salad, soup of the day, and a variety of sandwiches. Dinner was a choice between the two dishes that Reena decided to cook that day. The menus were chalked on a blackboard above the coffee counter.

  She made a huge pot of soup in the morning, using vegetables that I chopped up and whatever meat was left over from the day before, adding spices that she shook out of jars without labels. She made the sandwiches to order, standing at the wood block in the kitchen, her hands a blur, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. If the customers noticed the odd hint of ash in their food, they never complained.