Spud in Winter

by Brian Doyle

  Some of the shopkeepers are out shoveling, but it’s no use.

  Some are scraping little face holes through the frost on their windows and looking out, making faces.

  The Yangtze Restaurant looks like one of those explorer’s ships you see in pictures, trapped in the ice in the Arctic Ocean. Jasmine’s Sports Bar is below the sidewalk level. You have to go downstairs to go in. But it’s filled in with snow.

  The sports bar isn’t there anymore.

  See you in the spring, sports fans!

  The delivery guy comes out of Asia Pizza, carrying his pile of pizzas in canvas holders. He’s looking around for his delivery car. Is that it, right in front of him, or is that a snowbank?

  Dink and I climb up the steps and into the Hong Kong Beauty Salon. It wasn’t hard to get an appointment for tonight. A lot of people have canceled.

  Eddie Wong, the owner, says Connie’s coming in a little later. She’s got a couple of specials. And he might have other work for her because his regular hairdresser can’t come in because of the snow. You never know on a night like this...

  Dink and I sit in the chairs and flip through the magazines — some English, some Chinese, some Vietnamese. On the cover of one of the magazines is a photograph of Ottawa during the Tulip Festival. Sun, green grass, flowers, smiling faces.

  I’m wondering if some of the new Canadians came here because they saw this kind of a picture. I guess they were in for a bit of a shock.

  How could you ever believe, in your right mind, that a tulip could ever, ever grow in a place like this?

  Some of them must think that maybe they got on the wrong plane. Where are the tulips? How come no tulips? Oh, the tulips are under the snow, waiting there, in little bulbs! Honest!

  Liar!

  A big customer comes in, covered from head to foot in white. She shakes herself like a big dog. She stamps her feet, crashing them on the floor, shaking the Hong Kong Beauty Salon. She whips off her big fur hat and slams it down onto a chair, beating the chair with it. She takes off her leather mitts and whacks them across the counter, slapping the cold out of them. She climbs out of her coat and then shakes the coat, whipping it like she’s shaking a dirty mat. She puffs, she sighs, she snorts, grunts, blows her nose, rubs her hands, sighs, shakes her head, sits down.

  She looks over at the picture of the tulip on my magazine cover.

  “HA!” she says, and slaps her fat knee so hard that it must be stinging.

  Another customer is leaving. Eddie is helping him on with his coat. He had a hair wash like I’m going to have. Then dried. Eddie makes a joke about going outside with hair that’s not completely dry and frozen brains.

  He signs the guy up for an appointment for next week. In the appointment book.

  I look at Dink.

  Dink sees, too. The appointment book. That’s what we want.

  We know the date the van driver was last here. It’s the day before we made the appointment for Dink’s dad at the acupuncture clinic. That date between seven and nine P.M., Connie’s hours, when she works during the week.

  It’s my turn. I don’t get Eddie. I get his partner, a woman named Darlene. She knows me a bit and we talk about what a nice person Connie Pan is and what a good worker she is and how some customers want her to do their hair when they come in — just her “special” — nobody else.

  Some of them want to write it down in the appointment book, just to be sure. They write down their names, and they write Connie Pan down, too, just to make sure. I want a Connie Pan special...

  There’s soap in my eyes but I can see enough to see Dink.

  He heard.

  Now Dink asks Eddie Wong if he can use his phone.

  Now he’s at the counter, where the appointment book is lying open. Dink flips through the phone book pretending to look up a number. Then he punches up a number and talks into the phone and holds and talks some more and holds, pretending he’s on hold.

  All the time he’s casually looking back through the pages of the appointment book.

  Before the big customer gets into Eddie Wong’s chair, Eddie takes a Polaroid of her hair from the back and from the front.

  She poses pretty for the shots, then whaps herself into the chair.

  I ask Darlene how come she didn’t take my picture. Darlene says it’s just the people who are getting special new hairdos. Eddie likes to show them, after he’s done, what they looked like before...

  I look over at Dink. He’s got a funny look on his face.

  I know that look. Something’s wrong. What did he see in the appointment book?

  In comes Connie Pan.

  She’s surprised to see me just getting out of the chair.

  She’s happy to see me and Dink. She thinks it’s quite funny, all of a sudden, me, wanting to get my hair washed. She looks a little hurt, too, why she didn’t know about it. Maybe she could have done my hair. She’s wondering what’s going on...

  I pay Darlene and we get all our clothes on. Darlene says she hopes she dried my hair completely because we don’t want to get frozen brains, do we? We say goodbye to everybody.

  Outside, it’s snowing even harder. Dink and I stand in the street and talk, our faces close to each other’s.

  “Did you get the name?”

  “Yes, I did,” says Dink. “I saw it written twice!”

  “Twice?”

  “Once, under the date the day before the acupuncture clinic, and again today.”

  “Today?” I say.

  “Tonight. A Connie Pan special. His appointment is fifteen minutes from now!”

  We’ve been outside less than a minute and we’re already covered with snow.

  XIII

  It’s simple.

  As soon as we see him go in the beauty salon to have his hair done, I’ll call Detective Kennedy, get the cops over here. We go in, I identify him, they take him away and it’s finished.

  Once Spud Sweetgrass decides to do something, it gets done in a hurry! That’s it, that’s all!

  We’re across the street, waiting in the doorway of the Chinese bookstore, out of the falling snow. There’s enough light glowing through the snow on the shops and from the streetlights for us to see people coming in or out of the salon. I have quarters in one mitt and the card with Kennedy’s phone number in the other mitt. The phone booth is only eight or ten steps away. We can see it from here, the shape of it, anyway, covered with snow.

  We take turns going into the bookstore to get warm. They have magazines in there with naked Chinese girls on the covers.

  Dink buys one so the guy won’t get mad. “This is not a public library,” he always says if you don’t buy a magazine right away.

  Won’t Connie Pan be surprised! Just like on TV. We crash into the place. That’s him, grab him!

  Then, the last scene. Connie Pan in my arms. “Oh, Spud!” she’s saying. “Sh, sh,” I’m saying, patting her gentle on the back. “It’s all over now...I couldn’t tell you...” etc., etc., etc. Then the music...Connie Pan and me, walking off into the snow together, hand in hand. We stop to kiss under the streetlight in front of her house. There’s a snowflake on her philtrum...

  “His name is Faroni. His first name, just an initial. B,” Dink is saying, interrupting my video.

  “Probably Bubba or Bruno,” I say.

  “Address, 206 Cambridge Street.”

  “He’s practically a neighbor of Connie Pan’s! What is that place, the apartments? Or no, maybe it’s that rooming house.”

  There’s nobody around. Now and then, a car, churning down Somerset through the snow. The plow has been by once but the street is full again. The headlights of the silent car poke through the wall of flakes a bit, then give up and turn to ghosts.

  “Are you saying his name to yourself?” says Dink.

  “Faroni. Faroni,” I repeat.

  “No, his first name, too,” says Dink.

  “We don’t know his first name.”

  “B,” says Dink. “B. F
aroni. Say it.”

  “B. Faroni. B. Faroni,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Dink, laughing. “Beefaroni. Beefaroni! Say it!”

  “Beefaroni!” I say. “That’s his name? Beefaroni? We used to get that stuff when we were kids when we’d come home from school for lunch.”

  Everything is funny now. Everything working out. Dink and I, joking around.

  “And don’t forget his brother, Mac! Mac Aroni!”

  “Yeah, the Aroni brothers. Beef, Mac and Rice! The Aroni gang!”

  “Detective Marilyn Kennedy arrested a vicious gang of killers today getting their hair done. Mac Aroni getting his washed, Rice Aroni getting rinsed and the prettiest of them all, Beef Aroni, getting his curled!”

  “And don’t forget that other gang, the Agettis!” I say, and Dink catches it right away and says, “Oh, you mean, Spag, Alf and Smurf!”

  “And there’s also Envirogetti!” I say.

  “And there’s the Atoni brothers,” says Dink. Dink is better at this game than I am. He used to work at the IGA bagging groceries. He knows all the products.

  “Atoni?” I say. I wish I could get it.

  “No, not Atoni,” says Dink. “Actually I meant the cousins. You know them. Rig Atoni and his cousin Can. Can Nelloni.” Dink is running out of good ones.

  I want to keep doing this, but I can’t think of any more.

  I wish Beefaroni would show up and we could get it over with.

  A figure comes down Somerset Street, struggling through the snowdrift on the corner, now dragging to the steps of the beauty salon, taking forever, now up the steps, almost crawling up the snow, and in the door. A little person, not Beefaroni. A kid, maybe. Maybe Connie Pan’s mom.

  A few minutes go by and the lights of the shop go out. People leave. There’s Connie Pan. The figure who went in before is her mom. They fight their way, arm in arm together, down the street. Eddie Wong, the owner, locks up the place.

  “What about Tor?” I say to Dink.

  “You mean Tor Tellini?” Dink says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Tor Tellini. And what about Rav?”

  “Yeah,” says Dink. “Rav Ioli.”

  We both stare straight ahead, across the street, through the sheet of falling snow, at the dark windows of the Hong Kong Beauty Salon.

  “What about B. Faroni?” says Dink.

  “Beefaroni?” I say. “Beefaroni is not going to show up.”

  It’s not hard to catch up to Connie Pan and her mom. Her mom’s steps are so short in the deep snow that she doesn’t leave footprints. She leaves a narrow, straight little path. We’re up to them by the time they are turning down Cambridge. Number 206 is the old apartments near the corner. I don’t even look at the place as we shuffle by.

  If he’s sitting up in his apartment with the window open, holding an extrasensory listening device, he’ll hear me telling Connie Pan everything about him.

  Connie is already mad at me for going to the salon to get my hair washed without telling her.

  When she hears all about Beefaroni and how I saw him in the van driving the shooter, she’s more mad at me.

  And when she hears about how we talked about Beef’s hair and all that stuff in front of the acupuncture clinic that day and I didn’t tell her what was going on, she’s even more mad at me.

  We’re in front of her place now, under the streetlight. I tell her how Dink looked in the appointment book to get Beef’s name and tears come to her eyes, she’s so mad. Her mom is standing up to her waist in snow, on the front walk to their narrow little house.

  “Connie!” she calls. “Connie, come!”

  Connie is now as mad as she can get. She can’t get any madder and she says she thought we were friends and we shared everything and now she never wants to talk to me again, ever.

  Dink is standing at the outside circle of the streetlight. He’s holding his right hand up to the light, looking up. He’s probably conducting some kind of experiment with crystals and snowflakes and light waves, who knows. He’s covered with snow, anyway, like the rest of us.

  Connie brushes by him and plows up her front walk. She doesn’t want to talk to Dink the Thinker, either. She pushes up her stairs and gets out her key.

  Her mom follows her.

  Before they go in, her mom stops and turns around.

  “Bignose acting weir!” she says. “Go home! You tell you mom, you acting weir!”

  Yeah, I know, I’m acting weird. I have been acting weird since the day I saw Beefaroni drive the van so the hit man from Florida could shoot Al Laromano in the back, and I thought I’d protect everybody by dumping what I didn’t tell down a hole in the snow. Yes, Mrs. Pan, that is acting weird.

  “What are you going to do?” says Dink. The snow on his eyelashes and eyebrows makes him look like a mad scientist who had one of his experiments blow up on him.

  “I’m going home to phone Detective Kennedy,” I tell him.

  “Good idea,” says Dink.

  The rest of the way home, I feel empty. I’m giving up.

  I’ll tell my mom everything.

  My mom looks peaceful there, reading, the TV on but the sound off.

  Part of the way through my story, she puts her book down. Halfway through, she shuts down the TV. When I get to the part where I saw Beefaroni on the street, she comes over and hugs me. By the end, I don’t feel empty anymore.

  She sits with me while I call Detective Kennedy. I get her on the answering machine.

  I hang up.

  “Call again, and leave your name and number this time,” Mom says, very gently.

  I call and do that.

  I hang up and wait.

  My mom has sadness in her eyes. I don’t blame her. It must feel awful when your only kid makes a complete fool of himself.

  My mom takes my hand.

  “You’re just like your father. Brave. Bravery involves risks. Sometimes bravery ends in heroism. Sometimes in foolishness. Your father was on the side of right when he caused the uproar at the paper mill over the pollution. He was right. But he was fired...”

  There’s a long pause. A long wait. There’s more she wants to say. All of a sudden, I’m tired. It was very cold out there, waiting, across from the beauty salon...being a fool.

  Here comes more from my mom. Her voice is so soothing. I love the way she loves me...

  “Did you think that there might be a Polaroid of this character with the fancy hair? Did they take a shot of him — a snapshot of him before Connie did his hair the last time...?”

  I’m wide awake! What did she say?

  A photograph! Why didn’t I think of that! Beefaroni’s photo! What an idiot I am! Dink didn’t even think of it. It took my mom to see that...to figure that! A photo of the Beef!

  “Tell your Detective Kennedy’s big blue eyes about a possible photo of this creep. She’s going to love that!”

  My mom goes to get ready for bed and I lie down on the couch by the phone, waiting for Detective Marilyn Kennedy to call.

  Everything is so quiet. The snow muffles everything, even in the house. It feels so good to have it over with. Tomorrow, when it stops snowing, I’ll go out and open the hole. Some people might think that’s stupid, but the old story says if you don’t release the facts once they are no longer secret, the hole will never work for you ever again.

  Then, after it’s open, invite everybody up for a party, like we used to when my father was alive. The house full of people...laughing and singing...

  The phone’s ringing and I answer it. It’s B. Faroni. I put him on the speaker phone. He wants to talk to my mom. My mom comes out of the bedroom. She’s all dressed up. Going out to a party. B. Faroni is saying his hair is just the way she likes it and he’ll be here in a minute. My mom gets her coat on and a fur hat. B. Faroni is at the door. There’s a big pile of snow on top of his new hair. A conehead. My mom says he looks lovely. They begin to dance around the room. The orchestra is playing a big number. My father is the leader of the
band. He plays “Hanging Gardens” on his trombone, a song that he wrote and was a big hit. The last note he plays on his trombone is so long and strong, the wind from it blows the snow off B. Faroni’s head and straightens out his hairdo. My mom is being blown away in the blizzard and I’m grabbing her to keep her from being blown away. I have her by the clothes but her clothes are ripping. B. Faroni’s in slow motion...he’s got a rifle sticking out of a brown van...his face is close to the tinted window...the trombone is ringing.

  “Telephone, Johnnie! Johnnie! Get the phone!” My mother is calling from her bedroom.

  Half asleep. I’m sitting up on the couch, puffing and sweating. There’s the sound of faraway fire reels.

  I say hello into the phone.

  It’s Connie Pan. She’s not mad at me anymore. She’s excited. She’s saying there’s a picture of him. They took his picture the last time she did his hair. It’s in the counter drawer in the beauty salon, underneath where the appointment book is. She’s talking fast.

  “I have his picture, Spud! The Polaroid! We can give it to the police. They can put it in the newspaper. Then everybody in Ottawa is a witness!”

  I ask if she has a key to get in. She has. I ask if she can go out right now, even though it’s late. Her mother’s asleep. She can. I tell her I’ll see her under her streetlight in ten minutes.

  I phone Detective Marilyn Kennedy again.

  Still the answering machine.

  I leave my message again.

  Phone Spud Sweetgrass. Urgent.

  I get dressed and go out.

  I close the door gentle, not to wake my great mom.

  XIV

  It’s stopped snowing!

  The map from my door to Connie Pan’s is this: out my door onto Rochester Street, immediate right onto Anderson for one block, left onto Booth for a bit, right on Eccles for two blocks, left up Cambridge to the Pans’ narrow house and Connie’s door.

  I say it’s a map because, right now, at two A.M., I have to cut a trail, a new trail, through the new snow from my door to Connie’s. I’m a map-maker, a trail-blazer.