by Brian Doyle
The sun is a dead star in the blue sky.
You can’t see into the shops on Somerset Street because the windows are totally covered by a coat of thick frost in beautiful shapes like jungle ferns.
Connie Pan stops in front of the Mekong Grocery and traces the jungle ferns of frost with her mitt.
Someday she will sculpt beautiful shapes like this.
Inside the Mekong Grocery, the noodles are safely stacked on the warm shelves.
Last summer it was very hot here in front of the Mekong Grocery.
A chipwagon blew up here.
It was hotter than hell that day.
Today it’s so cold that even though there’s lots of traffic noise and wind noise, the noisiest, loudest racket is the crunching of our feet. The crunching, squeezing, creaking, squeaking, squealing of the frozen solid snow under our feet.
It’s so cold that the Weather Channel shows complete red alert and a whole list of safety hints and dangers about freezing your skin in ten seconds and not driving out of the city in your car without packing the following things: extra clothes, food, water, flashlight and a candle and some matches. “A simple candle in a stalled vehicle can keep you from freezing to death until help comes,” the TV says, over and over again.
Many people will be injured and some will be killed this week by the cold.
All up and down the side streets there are tow trucks, people standing around with jumper cables, other people leaning under the hoods of cars.
And clouds of swirling fog from roaring engines.
The cars look like strange animals with mouths open waiting to be fed on a farm on some frozen planet — not this one!
We’re heading down to the acupuncture clinic.
We decided to get serious about this project to save Dink’s dad from killing himself smoking cigarettes. We decided the day he had his picture in the paper.
A few weeks ago we open the paper and there’s Dink’s dad!
In the picture he’s sitting in a mall on a ledge in front of some plants. He’s smoking a cigarette, of course. He looks awful. There’s another guy sitting beside him. He is also by himself. Smoking. Dink’s dad is on his morning break from his government job in the passport office.
His office is above the fancy mall they call 240 Sparks uptown near the Parliament Buildings. The civil servants aren’t allowed to smoke in their offices so they go down to this mall and smoke.
The story in the paper beside the picture is about a fancy ladies silk-underwear-and-skimpy-pajama store that had to close down because of the cigarette smoke that floated up every day from the hundreds of civil servants smoking their cigarettes down there on their break.
The paper says the fancy underwear and skimpy silk pajamas hanging in the shop got to smell so bad of cigarette smoke that nobody would buy any of them and the store went bankrupt.
The owner of the store says in the paper that people who smoke should be taken out and shot and that she’s bankrupt because of them.
The picture in the paper, right beside the story, makes it look like it’s these two guys in the picture who are to blame and that they are the ones that should be shot.
“It’s not just my fault her underwear is full of smoke!” Dink’s dad says. “And I don’t even know this other guy!”
Not too long after that, the mall bans all smoking, and now Dink’s dad has to go outside and smoke.
Dink’s afraid his dad’s going to freeze to death out there.
That’s why we’re going down to the acupuncture clinic to get him an appointment. Get him to quit smoking altogether. That’s it, that’s all.
Connie Pan is telling us the names of more Canadian places she looked up in the atlas. The names of places that make her laugh, like Gold Bottom in the Yukon Territory, and Jenny’s Nose in Newfoundland.
Just as we’re turning to go up the stairs of the house where the acupuncture clinic is, I see something across the street that makes my heart stop.
It’s a man walking.
The only person out today without a hat.
The hair is big, black and perfect.
The face is tanned. The eyebrows bushy.
Terror runs through me.
I tell Dink and Connie Pan to go ahead in. I tell them I forgot to phone my mom at work about something. I tell them I’ll go back up Somerset to the pay phone on the corner. I tell them I’ll be back in a minute.
I run up Somerset all the way to Booth Street. The arctic air is freezing in my lungs. I pull my scarf right up over my nose and pull my toque down so that there’s just a tiny slit that I can see through.
I cross Somerset Street and start walking back down.
He’s easy to spot because he has no hat and the sun is glittering off his shiny, perfect hair. The wind is whipping a bit, blowing people’s coats and scarves. But his hair doesn’t move.
Probably frozen stiff.
He’s getting closer.
His face is square. His jaw is blue.
Closer.
His face is tanned, eyes wide apart.
Closer.
His breath clouds his face, then clears. Just like when he came into focus through the tinted window of the murder van.
His eyebrows are thick and almost meet each other over his nose. His forehead juts over his small black eyes.
His lips are carved, like out of wood. His jaw is clenched, making his face hard.
He walks with a roll, his head up, looking around, his arms swinging free. It’s like he doesn’t realize it’s minus 33 degrees, in the second-coldest capital city in the world. He has no earmuffs, no scarf, no hat. His beautiful, expensive coat is open at the neck. His gloves are tight and smooth looking. But not warm, probably.
His ears are blue from the cold but the tips of his ears are white. They’re starting to freeze.
“Look at my hair, everybody!” he seems to be saying. “Look at me!”
We pass each other.
I feel funny. There’s something very wrong with me. I’m going to fall down maybe. Now I realize what it is.
I’m not breathing!
Breathe, Spud, breathe!
I cross the street again and head back down to the acupuncture clinic. I glance back. He’s gone. Must have gone in somewhere. The Mekong Grocery, maybe. The video store, maybe. To get warm.
Thaw out his ears.
All of a sudden I’m not sure. Was it him?
Wasn’t there something missing? Is that what he looked like? Is that the same guy? The guy I wouldn’t tell Detective Kennedy about? I won’t tell anybody about?
I lied right into her large blue eyes when she said, “What are you afraid of?” and I looked away from those eyes, and I looked back into them and I lied and I said, “I’m not afraid of anything!”
Dink and Connie Pan come out of the acupuncture clinic. They’ve got the appointment for Dink’s dad.
While we’re walking up Somerset Street, I pretend to laugh, and while I’m doing this phony laugh I say to Connie Pan, “Remember that funny guy who loves his hair so much he’s always looking in the mirror? Your customer?”
She looks at me. Blank at first. Then, oh, yes, she remembers. Smile.
Then me.
“Well, I just saw him. Walking up the street. He wasn’t wearing a hat. Wants everybody to see his hair, I guess!”
“How did his hair look today?” Connie Pan asks.
“His hair? It looked great. Big and shiny. And probably frozen solid!” I laugh.
“I hope he’s happy,” says Connie Pan. Happy. I love to watch her talk. The way she says the word, happy. “He was very worried yesterday when I did his hair. He wanted to know if it was very charming with his new face!”
She saw him yesterday? She put her hands in his hair, talked, laughed with this guy just yesterday? The idea makes my knees weak.
“His new face?” I say.
“Yes, his new face,” says Connie, giggling like a little bell. “Oh, he looks sooo charming
now that he has shaved away his little mustache!” Shaved away.
Connie giggles some more.
“What a big change, eh, Spud?” she says.
That was it. That’s what was missing. That little mustache that looked like it was drawn on with a pencil.
“Many women will be in love with him now,” says Connie Pan, laughing again about her funniest customer. “He will be the talk of the ball!”
Talk of the ball.
Funny, alright.
Funny as a bullet in your back!
VIII
You can start at the Arts Center, at the downtown end of the canal, and you can skate up the canal all the way to Dow’s Lake. You can take off your skates there and get a free bus back, down Colonel By Drive along the canal, to where you started at the Arts Center. If it’s not too cold, you can hang around Dow’s Lake and look at all the snow and ice sculptures before you hop on the free bus.
Or you can do the whole thing the other way around.
Connie Pan is planning this for a group of E.S.L. students. It’s part of a project she started to make new Canadians feel better about being stuck in a strange country all of a sudden.
Last summer she organized a volleyball game on Westboro Beach which was a big hit. The best part of the game was Connie Pan made them play the whole game without a net and without a ball. Everybody enjoyed it.
While she’s telling me about the skating trip she’s planning, I start asking her how you say the word “canal” in Vietnamese. She’s showing me how to say “canal” and I’m putting my face right up to hers and I’m touching her philtrum, very gently, with my finger. I’m trying very hard to say it like she says it but it doesn’t sound right.
Then I say Colonel By in front of the word. Colonel By was an Englishman, an engineer, who built the canal more than 150 years ago. The driveway that runs along his canal is named after him. They should have named his canal after him, too. He built it, didn’t he? Instead, they call it the Rideau Canal.
Did he ever dream, in his wildest dreams, that a boy, half Abo and half Irish and half a whole lot of other things, would be teasing a girl, who was half Chinese and half Vietnamese, about how to say what his canal was?
“Colonel By sông dào,” I say very slow.
Then Connie says it again, very slow.
I press my finger gentle on her upper lip and say it very slow.
She has her two perfect hands on my face and she’s pressing my cheeks together so my lips pout out. I must look like a fish.
“Spuddy,” she whispers, “I like you.”
We’re standing outside the guidance office at Ottawa Tech. Connie Pan has walked me down here. The Cyclops wants to see me for some reason. Usually I only have to see The Cyclops once every two weeks. If you get kicked out of school you have to report to guidance every two weeks and get guided. It’s sort of like being on parole. They check on you, see what you’re up to. See how long it’s going to be before you’re hoofed out again.
See what further horrible crimes you’re committing these days.
In the display case outside the guidance office, The Cyclops has pinned up my picture from the newspaper last summer. Under the picture is the headline about John “Spud” Sweetgrass, hero. It’s nearly half a year ago that was in the paper. Every time I go by the guidance office I see it there.
Every time I go to see The Cyclops I ask him will he please take that picture down.
But he won’t. It’s still there, locked inside the display case, pinned up on the board.
Now, while Connie Pan and John “Spud” Sweetgrass, hero, have a hold of each other’s faces right outside the guidance office, out comes The Cyclops.
His eye is like a laser beam on me.
I think he means it’s time to let go of Connie Pan’s philtrum and go into his office.
Here I go. What now, I wonder.
The police called. A Detective Kennedy. She was asking about Sweetgrass. What kind of a kid is he, she wanted to know. Reliable? Honest? Ever been in trouble?
The Cyclops goes on.
“The police — she — told me you were the one who called in that gang murder on Rochester Street. Did that happen very near your place?”
“Right next door.”
“And you saw...”
“I saw a van. A brown van. I told the police.”
“And you saw a rifle...”
“Yeah, I told her that.”
“And you didn’t see anything else...”
“No.” What’s going on here? Is The Cyclops working for the cops now?
Looking into The Cyclops’ eye and lying is almost as bad as telling lies into the big blue eyes of Detective Kennedy.
“Why does she think you saw more than what you told her? Why does she think you’re holding something back?” says The Cyclops.
“I don’t know...”
If you look beside the one eye, look at his ear, for instance, it’s quite a bit easier.
Or at the sign he has on his desk. “Same-Day-Service-Sullivan,” the sign says. The Cyclops’ real name is Mr. Sullivan. The sign means that when The Cyclops says he’ll let you know about something soon, he’ll let you know that same day. This is true about The Cyclops. If he says he’ll do something, he’ll do it. Not like a lot of teachers. A lot of teachers say they’re going to do something for you and the next time you see them, they don’t even remember your name.
“I have a theory,” says The Cyclops. “The police are desperate to solve this string of underworld crimes. They’ll put pressure wherever they think...they’ll squeeze anybody and everybody they can, where there’s the slightest hope of new information...”
It sounds like The Cyclops is on my side. This is a switch.
“That was courageous of you to phone in what you saw. It must have been terrifying. Seeing someone gunned down in cold blood like that. You know, many people would have chosen silence, would rather not have been involved...leave-it-to-the-other-guy type of attitude...”
“I guess so. I don’t know,” I say, feeling a load of compliments coming on. Another big number to build up my self-esteem. That’s the way they work. They blow you right up and then tell you what they really wanted to tell you in the first place. Which is usually that you’re doing something wrong.
After this build-up, he’s going to tell me that I’d better tell the rest of what I saw, because they’re going to find out anyway and then it will be worse for me, etc., etc.
Here it comes.
“I just wanted to see you to tell you that they — she — called and that I gave them — her — a very positive report on you. That’s all I wanted to share with you. Keep me posted, as they say, that is, if you wish...and if you need any help, anybody to talk to, everything is, as they say, confidential here. Thanks for dropping by...”
Is that it? Is that all? Where’s the part where he tells me that what I’m doing is wrong?
I get up to leave. This is the easiest guidance visit I’ve ever had.
This Cyclops, this Same-Day-Service-Sullivan, guidance guy with the one eye, he seems all right. It almost feels good, the way he’s talking.
Now, some more.
“My grandfather,” he says, “was Métis. Part Cree Indian, as it were. He used to say that if you had a secret and you were stuck with it and it was burning inside of you, so to speak, he used to say that you should dig a hole in the ground around where you live and say the secret into the hole, at midnight, and then replace the earth into the hole exactly as it was. And if you did that, the old people used to say, you’d feel a whole lot better... whole lot — no pun intended, Spud, my boy!”
I guess I’m standing there with my mouth open.
Now I guess I’m back out in the hall.
There’s nobody around. Connie Pan’s gone somewhere.
The Cyclops has Abo blood! And that thing about the hole. Why didn’t I remember that? My father told me that once. And I completely forgot about it until now.
In fact, The Cyclops, for a second or two there, almost sounded like my father. “If you had a secret and you were stuck with it and it was burning inside of you...” That’s the kind of way my father would put it.
On the way home I’m thinking about my father’s ax. I think I know where it is, under all that old furniture in the back shed.
I turn off Wellington and head up Nanny Goat Hill which is Booth Street. It’s so cold, it’s hard to breathe. Maybe Dink the Thinker is right. Maybe this year we will win the championship as the world’s coldest capital city. Beat out whatsit, the capital of Mongolia. Or is it Libya? No, that’s the hottest. Dink told us that last summer.
The cold makes you sleepy.
A homeless man drops spit in a long string from his mouth. It’s frozen by the time it hits the ground!
I have a short chat with my mom about the old guy who won’t come out from under his bed, and then I tell her I’m tired and I’m going to bed early. She gives me a funny look.
I’m getting to be a pretty good liar. Or, am I?
The tired part isn’t a lie because I am tired, but that’s not why I’m going to bed early. I’m going to bed early because I have to get up early. Real early.
I set my clock for eleven-thirty.
I have to be wide awake by midnight.
IX
My alarm wakes me at eleven-thirty. The Weather Channel is completely red. WARNING. The temperature is minus 35. A record for this day. Forecast: clear and extremely cold.
Out on Rochester Street, car engines are revving and roaring, wheels are spinning, guys are shouting. It’s the gang coming out of the Village Inn across the street. Everybody’s out trying to start everybody else’s car.
Billows of exhaust and condensation. You can hardly see the sign “The Village Inn” through the clouds coming from the cars and the drunks trying to start the cars.
Hoods are open, tow trucks’ lights are spinning like searchlights, lit flashlights are falling into the snow-banks, cables are tangled, golden sparks are shooting from batteries, guys are falling, cursing, laughing, women are screaming, starters are whirring, doors are slamming, horns are blowing, rubber is screaming on the ice as hard as steel, tools are ringing, and two cars that are stuck together are ripping each other’s bumpers off.
