The Blue Helmet (13 page)

And saw, in profile, a tall, heavy man bent over an open dresser drawer, rummaging around inside.

I froze. My eyes darted around the room, seeking Reena. I caught sight of a slippered foot
protruding from the far side of her bed. A fuzzy pink slipper.

The man jerked upright. He was unshaven, wearing a jacket with a dirty fleece collar and heavy work boots. He lunged for me, but caught his boot on the edge of the rug by Reena’s easy chair, and fell. His head cracked the table by the chair, tossing the reading lamp the floor. He grunted as the air exploded from his lungs and lay there, dazed. I dropped to one knee and punched him on the temple as hard as I could. He groaned. I socked him again and he went limp.

I straddled him, yanked his arms behind him, and dragged the reading lamp toward me. I tore the electric cord loose and tied him tightly by the wrists, my knuckles already aching from the punches.

Reena lay sprawled on her stomach, her hair dishevelled, one arm caught under her body. I took her by the shoulders as gently as I could. She flinched, cried out, and tried to crawl away.

“Reena, it’s Lee!” I said. “It’s okay. He’s gone.”

Which wasn’t true, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say to calm her. She let me help her sit up.

“Can you stand?”

“Where’s Del?”

“Don’t worry about him. Come on, try to get to your feet.”

I helped her up off the floor and sat her on the bed, pulling her bathrobe closed and knotting the belt. Her head hung down, hair falling forward to cover her face.

“Reena, are you all right? Look at me.”

She raised her head. One eye was already purpling. A few strands of hair stuck to the blood that oozed from one nostril. Her lower lip had been split, and a crimson trickle leaked over her chin, dripping onto her chest. She breathed deeply through her mouth.

“Don’t let him hit me any more,” she gasped.

“Don’t worry,” I snarled.

In a black rage I stepped over to the man and grabbed him by his elbows, yanking them together and lifting. He had come around by then and as I hauled him out of the room he howled in pain. In the hall I dropped him, screamed, “Shut up!” and kicked him in the ribs. He let out another yelp. I latched onto him again and half lifted, half dragged him along the floor to the top of the unlit staircase, cursing, “You son of a bitch!” again and again.

“No, no, don’t!” he moaned, twisting his head to look up at me, his eyes wide with terror. He
was conscious enough to know what he was in for.

I let go of his arms, hooked one hand under the neck of his jacket, the other in his belt, and gathered my strength to throw him down the stairs. “Please! Don’t!” he wailed. “Please!”

“Lee! Lee!” Reena cried from her room.

In that split second, my mind was jammed with sound—the man’s begging, Reena’s screaming, the rage roaring in my ears. I held the man over the dark well of the staircase, my legs braced against his weight, about to dump him, watch him tumble and bounce down the steps, breaking his bones and twisting his neck.

“Lee! What are you doing?”

I lowered him to the floor and stepped back, breathing hard, my pulse hammering in my temples. I swallowed, heard Reena shout again. Then I turned on the staircase light.

O
N THE WAY TO
the hospital in the taxi, Reena said nothing, just stared through the window. After calling the cops, I had soaked a towel in warm water and wiped her face clean, then led her into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. She kept insisting she was “all right now,” but her hands shook and she seemed distanced, as if she’d taken a couple of tranquillizers. She was able to tell me that Del was an ex-boyfriend. She had kicked him out a few years ago when she finally realized that he was never going to give up the booze and drugs. Tonight he had come back desperate for money and beaten her up when she refused to give him any.

After the cops had told Reena they’d be in
touch to take her statement, they cuffed Del and took him away. Reena wouldn’t let the cops radio for an ambulance, so I had called a cab and helped her get into some clothes, which she pulled on over her pajamas.

At the Queensway General Emergency ward we waited along with more than a dozen other people, sitting in hard plastic chairs. A wall-mounted
TV
was showing a tabloid news program. There were a few coffee tables littered with magazines, a couple of vending machines, a broken play centre for kids. An old man sat by himself, an
IV
tube snaking from the back of his hand to a bottle on a stand by his chair. A guy, groaning, his arm in a sling, was being comforted by a young woman.

I sat with Reena, my arm around her shoulder. She kept licking her swollen lip, her eyes darting to the door every few minutes, as if she expected Del to burst in and punch her around again.

“I’m thirsty,” she croaked.

I bought two bottles of juice from the machine and turned back toward our chairs. Then I stopped. I saw Reena the way the strangers in the room must have viewed her. Under the harsh fluorescent lighting, her skin was
dry and pale, the shiner on her left eye coming up purply-yellow, her swollen lip distorting her features. In her eyes was the glazed look of someone who still hadn’t quite gotten a handle on what had happened.

And then Beth’s face flashed into my mind, staring up at me from the library bench after I had hit her, with that same uncomprehending look on her startled face. As soon as it slithered into my mind, I tossed away the excuse that I had been justified. That had always been my defense. It’s your own fault. You made me angry. You had it coming.

I was no different from the low-life I had almost thrown down the stairs.

Four hours later, a nurse in blue med fatigues came and led Reena away. I sat and waited, one of only a few uninjured, healthy people in a room full of casualties, until a different nurse brought her back a half-hour later. Reena’s lip had been stitched up and a head bandage held an ice pack over her black eye.

“We’ve given her a sedative,” the nurse told me, still holding Reena’s arm. “Now, before we release her, this hospital has a strict protocol and
I’m compelled to ask you some questions. Please follow me.”

The nurse, a small, thin woman with jetblack hair and a no-nonsense manner, led us out of the room to a quiet spot in the hall. She released Reena’s arm and adjusted the form attached to a clipboard.

“Have you reported this incident to the police?” she asked.

Reena nodded vaguely but said nothing. I told the nurse the cops had come to the café and taken away the man who had hit Reena. “One of them gave me his name and an incident number,” I added, taking a piece of paper from my pocket. “The information is there.”

The nurse nodded as she wrote. “Fine.” Then she shook her head with disgust. “Sometimes I think we’re living in a war zone. She’s the third one tonight.”

On the way home, Reena dozed, her head resting on my shoulder. I looked out the taxi window at the quiet, early morning streets, thinking about the day Cutter had taken my hands and examined my skinned knuckles. I knew now where he had been leading me when he left me his house and papers and personal history. He had wanted me to know why his hold on the real
world was so weak, and why he had decided to do away with himself, and until tonight I had thought I understood. But there was more than that. His story was a mirror that showed me something about myself. He was telling me in his long, roundabout, Cutter fashion that when the darkness comes, from outside or from inside, and tempts you to mine the schoolyard, blow up the building, pick up the gun, throw the punch—then you have two choices, the green helmet or the blue one.

You can join the war, or you can keep the peace.

I
WAS BUSY AT
the café for the next couple of weeks, taking on some of Reena’s normal duties while she recuperated, so the home delivery service was suspended for a while. She wanted to stay out of sight until her shiner cleared up and her lip healed, she said. It was humiliating to be seen all banged up like she was. I asked her why she should be embarrassed. She was the victim. I know that, she replied. I still don’t want to be seen.

Her battered face was a reminder of what I had discovered about myself, and what I had to do. I spent a lot of effort putting it off, telling myself how busy I was. On Sunday I slept in and puttered around my room for a while, killing time by cleaning the place up, but eventually I
made my way down to Reena’s kitchen with a bag of garbage and a half-dozen coffee mugs that had accumulated over the last week or so. I had tea and toast and jam with Reena while she watched a British soap opera centred around a bunch of losers who drank and gossiped at the same pub, then put on my jacket and told her I was going out.

“Where abouts?” she asked.

“Just something I gotta do,” I said.

“Mr. Mysterious.”

“That’s me.”

A while later I locked the tank to the rack outside the GO station and boarded the westbound train. While it rumbled along I tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. I lowered the book and looked out the window, fidgeting in my seat, watching factories and malls and housing tracts slip by as the train carried me closer and closer to Hamilton.

I wasn’t very good at thinking things through. I had never been a planner. Most of the time I found what was happening in my life pretty confusing—sometimes scary—and trying to sort out my feelings and my actions was something I stayed clear of, the way you’d step around a puddle on your way down the sidewalk. Maybe, I
thought, I had never wanted to look closely because I was afraid of what I’d see. Sitting in the swaying train car that day, lulled by the
click-clack, click-clack
of the wheels, I wondered if I had changed.

When I made my way though the Sunday crowd and out of the station, a bitter wind rushed from threatening clouds. April showers bring May flowers, I thought, a dumb rhyme we were taught in elementary school that was probably supposed to make us feel better. I buttoned my jacket and headed for the bus stop, fighting off the sense that I was sneaking into town against Carpino’s orders.

The drizzle had begun by the time I stood in the parking lot across the road from Beth’s house, a brick bungalow with a poured concrete stoop, just like all the other places on her street. I pulled up my collar against the rain, fighting the temptation to turn around and walk away.

I crossed the road and rang her bell. There was a big flowerpot against the iron railing, a dry twisted stalk sticking up from the dirt. Last year’s geraniums, I thought, like Reena’s. I pushed the bell again, just as the inner door opened.

Beth had cut her hair so that it was only a bit longer than mine, and the effect was to make her
even prettier, even more feminine. Her navy warm-ups accentuated the light blue of her eyes. She had the friendliest, most open face I had ever seen, but when she realized who I was, her eyes went flat and she took a half step back into the vestibule. She stood there for a couple of seconds, watching me through the glass storm door.

Then she began to push the inner door closed.

“Wait!” I said.

She looked over her shoulder back into the house, then opened the storm door and put her head around.

“Don’t come any closer,” she said.

I backed up, holding the railing, took two steps down.

“My father’s here,” she said. “In the living room, right behind me. What do you want?”

“To tell you how sorry I am,” I said. “To say I was wrong.”

Slowly, she moved from behind the door onto the porch. She leaned back slightly, then tilted her head in the way I had always found so attractive, and moved her hand as if she was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, only now her hair was too short.

“Coming here doesn’t change anything,” she said.

“I know.”

“I could have charged you.”

We stood silently for a few minutes. A car hissed by. Down the street, a kid yelled for his mother.

“I have to go now,” Beth said, but she didn’t move.

“Yeah, okay.”

I took the last two steps and walked down her sidewalk. After I crossed the road, I turned. She was still standing on the porch in the rain, watching me.

On the train I saw the same factories and shopping centres slip past the window in reverse order. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t expected Beth to forgive me, to smile and bubble and say it didn’t matter. I had been ready for anger, shouting, insults, anything but the cold brush-off I got. I was bugged by the fact that she hadn’t appreciated my apology.

And at the same time I knew I had no right to expect anything more. I had to admit that I hadn’t gone to her house for her sake. I had gone for me. To get back some self-respect. I can’t say that I felt good about myself, but I didn’t feel bad either, and that was something.