The Blue Helmet Page 5

  “Okay,” I said. “I can load it up and get it going, I guess. Done it a million times at Reena’s.”

  “Great!” he said. “They fire them if they get pregnant.”

  “The dishes?”

  “No, the girls. In the sweatshops.”

  Cutter dashed into his office as if he had forgotten something. I heard him at the keyboard as I stacked the dishwasher and turned it on. While it sloshed and groaned, I filled the sink with soapy water and finished off the overflow, setting the pots and dishes and cutlery in a rack to dry. I wiped down the counter and hung the rag over the faucet. I would never admit it to anyone, especially Reena, but I didn’t mind washing dishes. It was satisfying, in a way.

  In the other room I found Cutter standing with a handful of letters.

  “Could you drop these at the post office on 9th for me, Lee? Don’t put them in a street box. They’re too easy to break into.”

  “How come you don’t trust the post boxes but you trust me?”

  Cutter inspected my face again, as if trying to memorize every hair and pimple. “Good question,” he said. His gaze slid off my face and wandered the room. “I can’t explain it. I just feel like you wouldn’t let me down.” He seemed to focus again, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “I sure appreciate this, Lee.”

  I counted the envelopes, taking a quick look at the destinations. Various government offices, two for the United Nations, one for the Prime Minister. “Twenty is way too much, Cutter. A ten ought to cover it.”

  “Keep the change. A tip.”

  “No, give me a ten.” I figured ten bucks would pay for the mail and the library fine he had stuck me with.

  He rummaged around in a drawer filled with bills and coins and gave me the money.

  “Did you know you forgot to put your return address on these?” I asked.

  Cutter smiled crookedly, his eye twitching. “They know who I am,” he said. “They know all about me.”

  “And one more thing,” I added, pulling open the vestibule door. “Those disks hanging in your windows. What are they for?”

  Cutter cocked his head, as if I had asked the stupidest question in the world. “They deflect radio waves,” he said.

  TEN

  I WAS RELAXING IN my booth, taking a break and letting my thoughts wander while the breakfast crowd got their caffeine and sugar fixes. Around me, the tinkle of spoons on saucers and cups, the grumble of conversation, the rustle of newspapers. The tables along the opposite wall were full, and everyone was reading the news. At one point, as if they had rehearsed it, almost all of them held their newspapers open at the same time, making a sort of billboard, each black-and-white patch floating between a pair of hands. A headline shouted that someone whose name I couldn’t pronounce was on trial for war crimes in a city I had never heard of. A picture showed a man in a suit standing behind a podium, with a big sloppy grin on his face. Underneath, it said, GABLER ANNOUNCES ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVE. There was a story about the Sudan and Africa. An airline had gone bankrupt. And then, as people turned a page or shifted in their seats, the billboard broke up.

  I pushed my half-eaten muffin away. I had never heard of Gabler or the man on trial, didn’t know what the Sudan was, knew nothing about Africa or the airline. I couldn’t have felt more empty-headed if the readers of the morning papers had stood by my table and peppered me with questions. And suddenly I was ambushed by a familiar image—me, on the outside of a building, looking through a locked window into a comfortable room. People relaxing around an open fire, laughing and talking together, people who understood how the world worked.

  I was sick and tired of not knowing things. I shifted my eyes to the two guys by the café door, elbows on the table, heads together, the bills of their caps almost touching, then the students packed into the booth beside mine, arguing energetically about some book they were studying. Naturally, I hadn’t read the book. Naturally, I hadn’t even heard of it.

  In high school, as far as I went, I got through my courses without much effort, collecting credits the way you’d pick up stale food you really didn’t want in the cafeteria. But at the same time, although I never admitted it to myself, I always felt I was missing something. I knew I wasn’t stupid.

  I was ignorant.

  Not exactly a cheery conclusion to come to. Not exactly a morale booster. But I had to admit it was true.

  Why today? What had brought this on, the way you realize you’ve got frostbite only when your flesh begins to sting? Was it being around Cutter the brain so much, with his books and computers and far-out theories? Or Andrea, running her own business? Or Abe, with his weather maps and charts and storm-tracking software? Was it because Cutter was persuaded his work was important and Abe was having so much fun?

  The next time I took Cutter’s books back to the library—not overdue this time—and handed them in at the returns desk, I stood looking around at the ranks of shelves, the row of computers, the magazine rack. In grade nine we had had a library orientation class to teach us how the place operated and how to find stuff, but as usual I hadn’t paid much attention. I didn’t know what I wanted anyway. I was hopeless.

  I turned to go. Behind me, I heard, “Can I help you find something?”

  The guy on the other side of the desk looked more like a janitor than a librarian—rumpled jeans, baggy sweatshirt, a screwdriver in one hand, a stapler in the other. A pen hung from a cord around his neck. The cord was caught on a name tag that said CLANCY.

  “Um, well, I was sort of looking for—” what? I had no idea. “A good book,” I said stupidly.

  Clancy looked me up and down. He figures I’m a bonehead, I thought.

  “Why not try our Perennial Favourites table?” he said, pointing across the room with the screwdriver. “Over there. Call me if you need help.” He went back to trying to un-jam the stapler.

  Wondering what “perennial” meant, I took a look at the display, just so Clancy wouldn’t think I was a complete idiot. About two dozen books had been placed on wire racks so their covers were easily visible. I picked a few up, riffled the pages, put them back. Then I spotted a really thin one. The Old Man and the Sea it was called. A kiddie book. I flipped it open to the first page. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Didn’t sound like a kid’s story.

  I checked the book out, took it back to my room, and tossed it onto the table beside my bed. Maybe I’d read it, maybe I’d just hold onto it for a while and return it to the library. Later that afternoon, I was in Andrea’s drugstore to pick up a delivery to Mrs. Waslynchuck, a pensioner who lived alone—unless you counted the four cats—in an apartment on 33rd Street. In a rack of magazines and crossword puzzle books I saw a paperback, Increase Your Word Power! Add one word per day to your vocabulary! That’s 365 new, useful words each year! the cover said. Well, they can count, anyway, I thought, bending to replace the book. Then I changed my mind.

  “I’d like to buy this,” I told Andrea as I stuffed the little bag of Mrs. Waslynchuck’s pills into my pannier.

  “No way,” she replied.

  “Huh?”

  “On the house,” Andrea said, smiling.

  “Enjoy.”

  “Looks like we have a new customer,” Reena said as I pushed through the door into the café kitchen. She was adding up the lunch receipts at a little table in the corner, a half-eaten sandwich and a glass of milk beside her calculator. “Andrea recommended him to us. He lives on 13th. Bruce something.”

  “Cutter?” I said. “He’s ordering take-out?”

  She tilted her head toward a brown bag on the counter under the phone. The top was folded over and the bill stapled to it. “Cold chicken sandwich and a tub of salad. An older fella, is he?”

  “Thirties, maybe. In there somewhere.”

  “Sounded a little strange on the phone.”

  “Yup, that’s Cutter all right,” I replied, picking up the bag and heading for the back door.

  Garbage bins and recycling boxes overflowing with cans and bottles stood like sentries along the curb on 13th Street. Pickup day. As I walked up Cutter’s sidewalk, pushing the tank, the curtain at the front window twitched. I rang the bell, stepped back and made a face at the camera.

  “Come on in, Lee.”

  Locks clicked and clacked. Cutter held the vestibule door open for me. “How are you?” he said pleasantly.

  He led the way back to the kitchen. “Got time for a cup of tea?” he asked. “It’s all ready.” Cups, milk and sugar, and a teapot had been set out.

  “I guess so.”

  “Help yourself. Have you eaten?”

  “Yeah.” I filled the mugs with coal-black tea. I wondered how long it had been brewing.

  “Mind if I go ahead?” he asked, ripping open the bag. “I’m starved. I don’t always have a very good appetite.”

  “No problem,” I said, and sipped my tea. It was strong enough to dissolve the enamel off my teeth.

  Cutter seemed calm. His hair was combed, and he was wearing khakis and a cardigan over a white shirt. As if he was going to class. Not that I’d know how university students dressed. He ate slowly, forking the salad directly from the plastic container, taking small bites from the sandwich. His eye wasn’t twitching today.

  Then he jumped up and scooted through to the office. I craned my neck to see what he was up to. He was bent over, holding the drape back a little, peering out the front window as if he didn’t want to be seen. He stood up and returned to his chair and took a bite from the sandwich.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Oh, just checking, just checking.” I waited. “The garbage,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Well, you kn
ow. Making sure no one is messing with it. Taking it.”

  “You’re worried someone will take your garbage?”

  “Yeah.”

  This is going to be one of those Cutter conversations where we skate around in circles, I thought, holding back a laugh. I didn’t know whether I should humour him and keep talking, or let it go. But not talking would insult him, in a way. As if I thought he was a child and his conversation worthless.

  “Isn’t that why you put it out? To be trucked away?”

  “No. Yes. I mean, take as in rob.”

  “Who would steal garbage?”

  “They can find out everything about you by examining what comes out the back door,” he explained. “That’s why I use that big machine in the office. But even shredded paper can be reconstructed, I suppose.”

  It was hard to imagine a ring of trash thieves terrorizing the neighbourhood, but he was right, in a way. In the movies, cops and spies often scrounged through trash for information.

  “They look for records, right?” I said. “Phone bills, credit card statements, and stuff.”

  “Right,” Cutter replied, his face brightening. “You can construct a very reliable profile of a household by analyzing what they throw away. Our garbage is a mirror of our lives. Only with mayonnaise or peanut butter smears on it.” He smiled, pleased at his joke.

  “On the other hand, They already know everything about us. We live in an electronic wonderland. Most people have at least two bank credit cards, plus ones for gasoline, department stores, and so on. They don’t realize it, but all those corps exchange information about their clients. A lot of them sell the information to marketing companies. That’s where targeted junk mail comes from. There’s no such thing as privacy.”

  If Cutter was aware that he was contradicting himself, he didn’t show it. If he was right, why would anyone need to go through his garbage? But the more I was with him, the more I saw that being consistent wasn’t part of the way his mind worked.

  He popped the last bit of sandwich in his mouth and scrunched up the bag. “Feel like a walk?”

  “You mean outside?”

  “Of course. Just let me get my jacket.”

  I didn’t mind going. It was entertaining, listening to his way-out theories, probably because they had a certain amount of truth to them—or sounded as if they did.

  On the verandah, Cutter looked around, then plucked a hair from his head. He licked his fingers, ran the hair through the spit, and pressed it across the crack between the door and the frame.

  “If anybody sneaks in while we’re gone—”

  “You’ll be able to tell.”

  “Exactly.”

  I didn’t mention the back door.

  On the way down the street, Cutter’s eyes darted from side to side. Every few steps he looked over his shoulder. Then he stopped as if he’d forgotten something.

  “I’ve got to quit doing this,” he said, and started walking again.

  I wondered if he’d wanted to take a stroll because he was planning to tell me more conspiracies and he figured his house was bugged. I shook my head. You’re getting paranoid, too, I told myself. Cut it out.

  Around the corner of 13th and Lakeshore Drive, we passed through a gate in the high chain-link fence and entered the park. The lake was calm and slate-grey, the sky clear, the air chilly. To the west, the stacks of the Lakeview power generating station stood out against the sky. We walked along the bike path, stepping aside for roller-bladers and people pushing strollers.

  “This whole park,” Cutter said, ambling along, his shoulders hunched, his hands jammed into his pockets, “used to be a hospital for the mentally infirm. I read up on it after I moved here. It was actually a farm, and the inmates, the ones not locked down, grew vegetables and fruit. The idea was for the institution to be as self-sustaining as possible so it didn’t put too much burden on taxpayers. And experts in those days thought hard work was good for the patients. A lot of them were mentally retarded—the patients, that is. Then attitudes changed and drugs came along—a mixed blessing, believe me. Most of the inmates were released to other facilities, or onto the street.”

  I thought of the Queen of Sweden and a few of the other astronauts who sat in the café in the mornings.

  “The psychiatric hospital shut down,” Cutter went on. “For a few years the buildings and grounds were rented out to movie companies and TV shows. Then the college took over most of the buildings and fixed them up.”

  He stopped and looked around. “I like to visit sometimes and sort of commune with the ghosts of the crazy people who used to live here.”

  He didn’t say it, but I figured he was thinking that at one time he would have been one of the inmates, locked in a room behind bars, listening to the screamers as he tried to sleep.

  “It’s not much fun being crazy,” he said, kicking a stone on the path.

  I couldn’t think of anything to reply to that, so we walked in silence. I was feeling a little guilty, coming along because I thought Cutter might say something funny—to me, not to him.

  “You’re a big help to me, Lee,” he said after a while. Which made me feel more guilty.

  “Me? How? All I do is bring you your prescriptions and stuff.”

  “You just are.”

  ELEVEN

  AS SPRING DRAGGED INTO summer, the café customers traded their sweaters and jackets for T-shirts and shorts and skirts. Reena got the air conditioner serviced, added caesar and chef’s salads to the menu, and featured a fruit plate at lunch time. The chalkboard menu didn’t mention that all the pears and cherries and grapefruit segments came out of cans. The college crowd thinned out when classes ended and summer courses began. I never saw Eileen again.

  One sunny morning, I was tucked into my booth composing sentences and writing them in my notebook, crossing out the ones that sounded wrong. “Ensconced” was my word for the day, and I was having trouble using it in ways that didn’t sound stupid.

  With my pen I drew a circle around the first “e” of ensconced and coloured in the “o.”

  “You’re outta cream,” I heard from someone beside my booth. Someone who hadn’t washed in a long while.

  I looked up. “The Queen of Sweden was ensconced beside my booth,” I wrote, then scribbled it out and threw down my pen.

  “Morning, Your Majesty,” I sighed.

  “Never mind that, you’re outta cream,” she said.

  I went into the kitchen, where Reena was flipping eggs on the grill, and took a jug of milk from the fridge and carried it to the coffee bar.

  “There you go,” I said to the Queen.

  She nodded, her greasy grey hair falling across her face. She tossed the loose end of her blue and gold scarf over her shoulder—no warm weather clothes for her—and went about preparing her coffee. “Bad mood today?” she asked.

  I returned to the booth and wrote, “The Queen’s milk was ensconced in the café fridge.” Satisfied, I closed the notebook and picked up my mug of Colombian.

  The night before, Reena had called me down from my room on the third floor just as I was about to hit the sack. She was sitting in her easy chair, smoking, her glass of red on the chair arm, the evening news flickering on the muted TV. Her feet, clad in oversized fuzzy pink slippers, rested on a hassock.

  “I need to have a talk with you,” she had said, smoke streaming from her nostrils.

  Dread blossomed in my chest. I stood in her doorway, one hand on the jamb. She’s going to kick me out, I thought, anger seeping into my mind. She’s had enough of me. That fight in the café a few weeks ago did it. Well, it wasn’t as if I didn’t deserve it, but leaving would be hard. More than I realized, I liked living with her. True, I had nothing to go “home” to, but it was more than that. I had thought she liked me.

  “I guess I’m going back to my old man’s,” I said bitterly.

  Reena looked at me over the rim of her wine glass. Her brow creased. “What makes you say that?’

  “That’s why you called me down here, isn’t it?”

  “You’re way off base, Lee,” she said. “Sit down and relax. Jesus, you’re always so wound up.”

  I lowered myself to the edge of the bed. “Okay, what?”

  “I spoke to your dad last night.”