The Blue Helmet (11 page)

Carrying the chair, I marched from room to room, pulling the drapes open and jerking down the disks. Then I climbed the stairs and freed the windows up there. With light coming in, Cutter’s bedroom seemed less creepy. I stripped the linen from his bed, collected the towels from the bathroom, and hauled the whole lot downstairs to the garbage.

I propped open the door of the “crazy room,” as I had come to call it, set my radio on one of the filing cabinets, and tuned it to a local rock station, turning the volume low. I cleared
the desk, piling Cutter’s books and files on the table, and climbed on top. One of the bulbs in the ceiling fixture was dead, the other only a 6o-watt, so I replaced both of them with the stronger bulbs I had brought with me.

The bright light chased the shadows from the corners, but the wall with the manic graffiti seemed to shout even louder. The strange words,
MOOTWA
, Kijevo, Kurtz, Karlovac, blazed against the black background. Grunting with the effort, I turned the desk around so I wouldn’t have to face the madness.

I opened my notepad, placed it on the desk, and began with the filing cabinets. In the first, all three drawers were packed with neatly labelled files. I flipped through a few. “International Monetary Fund” took up four inches, “Land Mines” another three, “Political Donations: Corporate” and “Privatization of Military” a whole drawer. Cutter’s research. I wondered how many hours he had spent compiling all the information.

I pulled open the top drawer of the second cabinet. It seemed to be devoted to Cutter himself. There were records dating back to his days in elementary school, and more recent legal papers like insurance policies, a copy of the deed to the house, warranties for appliances, and a
thick folder of documents relating to his video game. The first file in the middle drawer contained one sheet of paper with Department of National Defense on the letterhead. It was dated a month or so before Cutter killed himself. It was addressed to him, and said, “On December 1 at 08:00 hours, a ceremony will be held….” I skipped down the page. It named a place, a stadium in Winnipeg. Why, I wondered, was the Department of Defense writing to Cutter? Somehow I couldn’t imagine him, with his strange ways, part of an army, standing to attention or saluting or polishing his buttons. Or following orders.

But then I heard myself say, “Hey, wait a minute.” The last time I had seen Cutter he had said something I let slip by because it meant nothing to me at the time. Fifty wars, he had told me, were raging right now, somewhere in the world. And then, “I was a peacekeeper, once.”

There were more files concerning military stuff. And magazine and downloaded newspaper articles about investigations and commissions of inquiry into army matters. The dates stretched back over ten years.

In the bottom drawer I found three hardback notebooks. They were cloth-covered, scuffed and
stained, the pages curled and dirty. I flipped one open. Neat handwriting filled the pages. Cutter’s handwriting. The margins were covered with doodles, little drawings of houses, mountains, farm wagons. I opened another. The writing was more spidery, as if hurried. The black and red ink sketches showed tanks and rifles and bullets. In the third, scrawls punctuated by exclamation marks filled the pages, sometimes corner to corner rather than between the lines. And the drawings depicted skeletal faces, mouths stretched wide in horror, eyes missing, teeth broken.

I slammed the book closed, my heart racing, and went to push the drawer closed with my foot. Then I saw something. I set the books on the desk, got down on my hands and knees, and reached to the back of the drawer. My fingers scraped on metal. It was a helmet, light blue in colour. I set it on the floor and it wobbled a couple of times. I reached in again and brought out a wood-handled knife in a leather sheath. The knife was razor sharp. The last item was an old shoe. A child’s leather shoe, scuffed, the heel worn down. One side and the toe were covered by a stain, dark, reddish-brown, blackening at the edges.

Blood.

By late that afternoon I had moved my centre of operations downstairs to the office. I cleared the trestle tables, piling the contents on the floor under the front window, and tidied the computer desk. I dug out Cutter’s software disks and, while I held the cell phone to my ear, followed Abe’s instructions, installing the encyclopedia and word-processor on the computer Cutter had devoted to Internet access so I’d have everything in one place. It would be my research headquarters. “Might as well add the mail program,” Abe advised. “Then you can contact me that way, too, if you want. What’s going on up there, anyway?”

“I’ll let you know,” I replied, “when I know.”

I was fumbling in the dark. I had a powerful feeling that I was starting out on some kind of journey, not at all sure where I was going or how I would get there, but I knew the direction I’d take. There would be a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a million pieces to put together. Probably false trails and dead ends. I had a ghost leading me.

I called Reena, told her I’d be home late. “You sound excited,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I think I’m onto something. Talk to you later.”

I jotted down a list of words already burned in my brain. Kijevo, Kurtz, Karlovac,
MOOTWA.
I launched the computer’s encyclopedia. Today was as good a day as any to begin.

“Hang on, Cutter,” I said to the empty house. “I’m on my way.”

C
UTTER WAS AN “ONLY,”
like me. He was born in a little town called Pictou on the Northumberland Strait that separates Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. His parents ran the snack bar on the ferry that worked the crossing between nearby Caribou and Woods Island, PEI.

Cutter’s school records showed a monotonous string of A’s, from grade one through high school, with neat handwritten comments that praised his high marks and pointed out that he was a loner and seemed to be withdrawn at times. Except for the grades, I could have been reading about myself.

He got into the University of Toronto on a
full scholarship and proceeded to knock off top marks and prizes in electrical engineering. Somewhere along the line he became a pacifist. He didn’t believe war was noble or heroic. He thought it was insane.

From Cutter’s diary, volume one

In his first year of university he caught the computer game bug and by the middle of second year he was already designing his own games and thinking about signing up for the
armed forces reserves, which seemed like a strange interest for a pacifist electronics genius with a bright future promising great jobs and lots of money. His mom and dad were against it. “Too dangerous,” they said, in the letters that Cutter had kept. “You could get killed, Bruce, and then what would we do?”

His parents were driving home from the Caribou ferry wharf one night when a drunk driver wandered across the solid line, turning their pickup truck into scrap metal and making Cutter an orphan.

He began his diary when he signed up and became a “weekend soldier.” It described his infantry training on weekends and holidays, and his hope that someday he’d become a peacekeeper with the United Nations. He got top scores in marksmanship but had no intention of firing his weapon at another human being. “Fighting for peace,” he wrote, “is like shouting for silence. I’m going to do
MOOTWA
, Military Operations Other Than War.” A pacifist in the army. Typical Cutter.

In 1993 he heard that Canada planned to send forces to the Balkans as part of
UNPROFOR
, the United Nations Protection Force, and he volunteered. Yugoslavia was tearing itself to pieces, and
the U.N. was trying to keep people from each other’s throats.

From Cutter’s diary, volume one

Cutter’s platoon set up camp in a deserted village and began fortifying the walls with bags of dirt. Their mission was to keep the main road open, disarm the combatants, destroy weapons dumps, protect the citizens, keep the peace.

“What peace?” Cutter wrote. “This place is no-man’s-land. Sniper fire. Skirmishes. Ambushes. Murders and retaliations. Ordinary people—and us—caught in the crossfire.”

But a lot of the time, Cutter was bored. He spent his downtime reading, keeping his diary up to date, playing soccer with local kids, maintaining his equipment. He honed his jump master’s knife whether it needed it or not, and oiled the leather scabbard. It had been made in Pictou, where he grew up.

From Cutter’s diary, volume one