The Blue Helmet (15 page)

When she could breathe again, Reena said, still laughing, “It’s just that, if you saw the way Lee looks at the college girls in the morning, you wouldn’t think what you’re thinking.”

“Look, it’s no big deal,” I explained. “I wanted to give you some money. To get rid of that loan you’ve been carrying around since…. So you can quit your second job. That’s all.”

He looked out the window, then down at his hands, then at the bank statement. Quietly, Reena left the room. I heard her bedroom door close softly.

“No big deal, you tell me,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I can’t accept it.”

My hands began to tremble. Then came the
rush, the blast of anger, the heat rising into my face. The words burst out before I could think. “Why the hell not?”

Then I looked at his rough hands, his thick fingers, the skin raw from solvents he used to dissolve oil and grease. His face, pinched from too much hard labour and too much worry. And I realized something I had never seen, because I had never looked. He was lonely. He worked twelve hours a day, shuffled from home to work and back, slept, and then did it all again. For him, tomorrow was nothing but another today.

“It …” he began, then faltered. “Try to understand, Lee. The vacation your mom and me took, it was all I could give her. She was sick and she was gonna die, and I couldn’t do anything about that. But I could take her to the places she had always wanted to visit. You shoulda seen her over there in Italy, at the galleries and that. She knew she didn’t have long, but she was full of—joy. Only regret she had, she’d say, was that you weren’t there.

“See, the loan I’m working to pay back, it’s like I’m still doing it for her. I can still give her something. I know it sounds crazy, but if I take your money, I’ll lose that.” He rubbed the back of his hand under his nose and took a swallow of
coffee. “Does that make any sense?”

I sat back in my chair, turning my cup around and around by the handle, thinking. I understood what he was telling me.

“Yeah, Dad, it does,” I said. “But think about it this way. When Mom got sick, I was just a little kid. You took her to the museums and art galleries. But what could I do for her? Nothing. I haven’t been a very good son. This is my chance. I want to do this for both of you.”

We were silent for a few minutes. Then my father said, “I haven’t heard that word for a long time.”

“What word?”

“You called me Dad.”

He hung his head. “I miss her,” he said. “I miss both of you.”

I
WAS HALFWAY THROUGH
a breakfast of bacon and eggs when a stranger shambled through the café door—a not-very-tall guy, wearing an overcoat that hung almost to his broken-down running shoes, a greasy baseball cap and a scarf wrapped around his neck and over his ears, although the sun was shining out on Lakeshore Boulevard. A street person who had heard about Reena’s, I guessed.

He made his way to the back counter just as the Queen of Sweden turned away, holding her mug of steaming Colombian. She gave him a look that said, They’re letting just anyone in here nowadays, and took a seat at her table. Even from my booth I could see the man’s hands shaking as
he picked up a mug. If he tried filling it, he’d burn himself for sure. I hustled over, beating him to the coffee pot, and topped up my own mug.

“Can I pour some for you, too?” I asked.

Silently, he handed me his cup. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, his complexion waxy under a few days’ greying stubble. His mouth had collapsed in on itself. No teeth, I guessed.

“Cream and sugar?” I asked.

He nodded, sniffed wetly, and jammed his hands in his coat pockets to hide the tremors.

“Grab a seat and I’ll bring it over to you.”

He hesitated, then did as I suggested. I put in three spoons of sugar and lots of cream. Sometimes the only nourishment the alkies got all day was what came in their coffee, Reena had told me one time.

He was sitting at a table by himself, his back straight, chin up, staring straight ahead. He looked almost dignified. I set the mug down on the table in front of him.

“How about something to eat?” I asked. “We’re out of cookies, but I could get you something.”

He looked up, nodded, wrapped his soiled hands around the mug, then carefully, as if lifting a piece of priceless china, raised it shakily to
his mouth. He slurped, swallowed, and said, “Ah.”

I headed for the kitchen, and noticed Reena leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me and smiling.

“What?” I said, following her through.

She quickly made a honey sandwich, slipped it onto a plate and handed it to me. “Let’s hope he can keep it down,” she said.

“Why were you watching me?” I asked.

“Oh, I was just thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“Nothing.”

I pushed open the kitchen door. “Tough guy,” she added, as I passed through.

I put the plate down beside the guy’s cup, then went back to my booth.

Because it was Sunday, I had phoned ahead to make sure I’d find Sergeant Carpino at the cop shop. When I asked for him at the front desk, the officer on duty picked up her phone, punched a number, mumbled something, and said, “He’ll be with you in a minute.”

I waited on one of the benches. The place was pretty quiet. A few uniforms came and
went. A phone rang somewhere. After a while Carpino, his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, his tie pulled loose, came through a door beside the desk. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked at the duty cop, who pointed to me.

I stood and walked over to him.

“Long time,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t supposed to come back here.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Still living in New Toronto? With your aunt?”

“Yeah.”

“Your dad know you’re here?”

“No. This isn’t about him.”

Carpino looked me over. “What’s it like out?”

“Sunny. Warm.”

“Let’s take a walk.”

He retrieved his jacket from the squad room and led me out of the station and down the block to a micro-park next to a parking arcade. Pigeons strutted around on the dirty sidewalk next to potted shrubs, their heads bobbing, scurrying out of the way when a pedestrian came by.

Carpino sat on a bench and lit up a smoke. “So, what’s going on?” he asked.

I sat next to him. “I want to know if you’re going to charge me,” I said.

He gave me a suspicious look. “Explain.”

“That day you dropped me off at my aunt’s in New Toronto, you told me if I came back home you’d nail me for the B and E and a couple of assaults.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So I have to know, are you going to charge me? Because, if you are, I want you to do it now. I’m ready. I have a lawyer. If you’re not, I need to know that, too. I don’t want all this hanging over my head.”

Carpino watched the pigeons for a moment, then seemed to find something fascinating in the traffic light across the way. “You seem … different,” he said.

“I am different.”

“How so?”

“It’s a long story. Look, I want to start over,” I said. “But I want to pay my bills first, you know?”

“So you came here to be arrested. To turn yourself in.”

“If that’s what it takes, yeah.”

He lit a fresh cigarette off the old one, dropped the butt onto the pavement, and
ground it out with the toe of his shoe. One of the pigeons strutted over to investigate. Stuffing the pack of smokes into his shirt pocket, Carpino looked me straight in the eye, his lips a thin line.

“I don’t know nothing about any assaults or a B and E,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He stood and pointed toward the nearest intersection. “See that sign for the city bus?”

“Yeah.”

“When number 52 comes along, you get on it. It’ll take you right to the GO station.”

He turned and walked back along the street, toward the police station.

O
N THE
S
ATURDAY OF
the July 1 holiday weekend, I steered the tank into the driveway of the house on 13th Street, parked and locked it in the garage, and walked around to the front, carrying a bag of books I had picked up at the library. Clancy had gotten me onto the Rebus detective novels, and I was reading them in order.

Reena was sprawled on a chaise longue in the shade of the verandah, smoking and reading a movie magazine, a beer on the table beside her. Patch the One-Eyed Dog lay beside her snoring.

Cutter’s mailbox had been removed, the surveillance camera taken down, and the verandah freshly painted. Reena had put in a flower garden
across the front of the house, with a cedar tree at each end. Patch peed on the trees whenever he could.

I mounted the steps, plunked my bag down on the table, and took a swig of her beer. It was icy cold.

“Ahh,” I said. “Boy, it’s hot out. Abe says we’re going to have a banger of a thunderstorm later.”

“Tell that to the hired help,” she said, waving toward my father.

He was on his hands and knees beside a wheelbarrow, smoothing the veins of new cement between sections of the flagstone path. His T-shirt and jeans were smeared with mortar. He had re-sodded the lawn and it stretched green and weedless to the sidewalk.

“Do you think he’ll ever stop working?” I asked.

“He’s never owned a house before,” she said. “He’s bubbling over with enthusiasm. Watching him makes me want to go and lie down for a while.”

“You are lying down,” I said.

“Good point.”

At the beginning of the summer I had gone to Lakshmi and asked her to transfer the house
to my father’s name. When all the paperwork had been done, I had mailed it to him with a note saying, “Now you have to move to New Toronto.”

“Be patient,” Reena had advised me. “He’s a proud man. He has to get used to the idea of being given something.”

He had quit his job at the department store by then, but couldn’t tear himself away from the apartment where he and my mother and I had once been a family. It had taken a few weeks and a lot of phone calls, with Reena helping me nag, to persuade him to move to 13th Street. It wasn’t long before he found a job at a local garage. His old employer had given him a good reference.

Together, my father and I had repainted every room in the house. He moved into Cutter’s old bedroom, and I took the “crazy room,” after we had replaced the painted-over window and papered the walls. I had moved up the computer equipment I wanted and given the rest away. I held onto two of Cutter’s aluminum disks and hung them in my window, for old time’s sake. Cutter’s office was our living room. We kept the big
TV
, but got rid of the satellite dishes.

My father and Reena were pushing hard to get me to go back to school, but so far I had
resisted. “I don’t have time,” I said. Which was true. The Lee Mercer Courier Service was busier than ever and I still helped Reena at the café. “Maybe I’ll take a correspondence course or something,” I told them, mostly to keep them off my back. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t such a bad idea.

I went inside the house, pulled a cold beer from the fridge and took it back to the verandah.

“Dad,” I called. “Time for a break.”

He stood, wiped his brow, dropped the trowel into the wheelbarrow, and joined my aunt and me. He was tanned from working outdoors and his eyes had lost their beaten-down look. He dropped into a chair, took a long pull from the bottle, and sighed.

“You know,” he said. “We oughtta plant perennials in the back yard. Less maintenance.”

“Annuals are better,” Reena said lazily.

While they argued good-naturedly, I sat on the steps and looked up and down 13th Street. Between the houses opposite I caught a glimpse of the lawns and maple trees in the big park that used to be a mental hospital, and I remembered Cutter telling me he liked to visit once in a while and commune with the ghosts of the patients who used to live there. He had gone to a violent,
far-off place to make peace, and he had brought the war home with him, in his mind, a bloodless wound deeper than any bullet could go. I looked at our new grass and stone path, breathed in the odour of fresh paint, and tried to remember him, not as I had last seen him, but as the guy with racing cars on his pajamas and a stack of printouts in his filing cabinet, beside his blue helmet. My friend, who showed me that I had to face the war inside myself before I could find peace.

The Blue Helmet
is a work of fiction, and all characters are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental. The firefight between Canadian
UNPROFOR
forces and elements of the Croatian army in the “Medak Pocket” on September 16,1993, is a matter of record. I have made certain changes in the details of that action and the subsequent events in order to serve .my narrative.

I found the following useful in researching background for this story:

Carol Off.
The Ghosts of Medak Pocket
. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004.

Lee A. Windsor. “The Medak Pocket.”
www.cda-cdai.ca/library/medakpocket.htm

John R. Lampe. “Ethnic Politics and the End of Yugoslavia,” the final chapter of his
Yugoslavia as History
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Readers who are skeptical of Bruce Cutter’s reluctance to fire his weapon even in the heat of an attack are invited to consult Gwynne Dyer’s
War
, Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004, pp. 54–7, and pp. 5–39 of Dave Grossman’s
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1995.

I want to thank my publisher, Maya Mavjee, for supporting this project; my editor, Amy Black; and my friend and agent, John Pearce.

As always I am grateful to my support group, Dylan, Megan and Brendan Bell; and especially Ting-xing Ye for her encouragement and inspiration.

Special thanks to Sloba Golubovich-Bray for advice in cultural matters.